The effects of COVID are ongoing and will continue as long as the ‘restrictions’ for the pandemic continue on business intercourse. However, remember as I have said that what COVID is doing is not so much ‘destroying’ the economy, but exposing what already existed and was going to cause major problems in the future. It just provided an all-too opportune scapegoat at what is a historically all-too opportune time.
According to the Washington Post and reposted by Chron, 2020 was the worst year for the US economy’s growth since 1946, marking it officially the worst year since the end of World War II.
The U.S. economy shrank by 3.5% last year as the novel coronavirus upended American business and households, making 2020 the worst year for U.S. economic growth since 1946.
Economic growth slowed in the fourth quarter, rising just 1% from the previous quarter, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. That’s equivalent to an annualized rate of 4%.
It is the first time the economy has contracted for the year since 2009, when gross domestic product shrank by 2.5% during the depths of the Great Recession. It is also the worst year for economic growth since 1946, when the economy shrank by 11.6% as the nation demobilized from its wartime footing.
“There has been a broad recovery, but economically speaking, we’re not out of the woods yet,” said Ben Herzon, executive director at IHS Markit.
This is the last GDP report from former president Donald Trump’s tenure. Until the pandemic, Trump was on track for an economic record that put him near the middle of the pack among recent presidents. But the covid-19 crisis has ensured that he is likely to have overseen the slowest economic growth of any president in the period since the Second World War. (source)
This is just the beginning. Remember that 2020 was the year that the pandemic started. This is 2021, and the momentum of the previous year is simply going to roll-over and continue unless major political changes are made, and this is very unlikely to happen. Instead, the trend will be to expect the same continued economic fallout, and with that, lots more money printing, since at this point, the government is keeping the economy afloat by printing money to pay her debts by way of literally ‘bailing out’ the public’s debts, which are unsustainable, just as with this policy.
This current recession- which it is if people are being honest, but that cannot happen for policy reasons -is worse than the Great Depression, meaning this is the ‘Greater Depression’ that we have been and are in, and it is not going to get better.
As I have said before, a trend to watch is the ‘busting’ of commercial real estate. That is looming over the heads of people, and when it happens, it is going to cause an absolute blow-out to the US economy.