The spring meetings of the World Bank and IMF will be held virtually this week amid a profound economic crisis spurred by a novel coronavirus. Unlike previous such viruses, this went global in such a destructive way that many countries have responded the same way. Encouraging social distancing, closing non-essential businesses, and enforcing lockdowns. The economic contraction that has begun is beyond what has been seen since the Great Depression. Even before the IMF’s World Economic Outlook is released, Bloomberg Intelligence, the analytic arm of the news service, cautioned that its forecasts would not be sufficiently pessimistic.
The American social historian Studs Terkel called his book on the Great Depression, “Hard Times,” because that is the way most experienced it. It was a Depression for those that had, but so many were struggling to make ends meet and to secure steady employment, that for them, it was just hard times. The same might be said for many…
