Mon 18 May 2020:
The world’s biggest economy faces a severe downtown but will not suffer another Great Depression, US Fed chief Jerome Powell said on Sunday, as three hardest-hit countries in Europe reported low death tolls and lockdowns eased.
In the United States, too, with more than 30 million jobs destroyed, states have begun reopening even though federal guidelines for a two-week decline in cases have not always been met.
The US economy could “easily” collapse by 20 to 30 percent this quarter, and unemployment could peak at 20 to 25 percent, but, “it should be a much shorter downturn than you would associate with the 1930s,” Powell, the Federal Reserve Chairman, said on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”
On Sunday, the United States also recorded its lowest daily death toll in a week, at 820, but the country with the world’s highest number of coronavirus fatalities neared 90,000 dead.
But with people growing weary of confinement and suffering immense economic pain, governments face growing pressure to ease lockdowns. US President Donald Trump has been keen to get his country’s economy going again.
A top Trump economic advisor, Peter Navarro, took a swipe Sunday at the long-respected Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, saying that by initially providing a flawed test for COVID-19, the federal agency “let the country down.”
New York, long a virus hotspot, has seen steady improvement, and Governor Andrew Cuomo on Sunday took a virus test on live television in a bid to encourage more widespread testing and pave the way for a safer reopening of the populous state.
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