Coronavirus: Global recession?

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 5 March 2020

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Central banks are rushing to provide liquidity as many fear that the disruption from the coronavirus outbreak could push the world into technical recession.

We hear from a host of eminent economists trying to navigate the uncertainty: Sarah Bloom Raskin, deputy secretary to the Treasury under US President Barack Obama; former ECB chief economist Peter Praet; and Cornell University professor of trade policy Eswar Prasad.

Plus Ed Butler looks at one of the industries feeling the most pain - airlines. Peter Morris of the aviation consultancy Ascend by Cirium says that while the long-term growth outlook remains strong, some carriers may struggle to survive the plethora of flight cancellations over the next few months.

And what does it mean for China, the epicentre of the outbreak? China consultant Diana Choyleva of Enodo Economics says it could prove a heavy blow, coming at a time of trade tensions and a general slowdown in exports.

Producer: Stephen Ryan

(Picture: A Kuwaiti trader wearing a protective mask at the Kuwait stock exchange during the coronavirus pandemic; Credit: Yasser al-Zayyat/AFP via Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Looking out the window immediately there was a sea of debris.
0:04.8	13 minutes to the moon. Season 2, coming soon.
0:11.8	Hello there, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service.
0:16.5	Coming up, as the coronavirus spreads, so does economic contagion.
0:22.5	What's it like for people trying to do business in China?
0:25.4	We have reports from the various industrial organizations in China
0:29.1	that SMEs have between maybe a month to three months' cash left.
0:36.2	Storm clouds gathering for the global airline industry too, they say,
0:40.9	although some still glimpse a silver lining.
0:43.9	It has had these bumps along the road,
0:46.1	whether it's a financial downturn or a health crisis,
0:49.2	and so far it's recovered from all of those.
0:51.9	So my underlying feeling would be pessimism in the short term,
0:55.5	but optimism for the long term. That's all to come in Business Daily from the BBC.
1:02.6	While the advent of the coronavirus outbreak, COVID-19, as it's also known, has certainly brought
1:08.5	with it stock market turmoil. Record falls on the markets last week,
1:12.9	which in turn have led to central bank interventions. The Federal Reserve announced an unschedule
1:18.0	rate cut on Tuesday, half a percent, the first emergency cut since the global financial crisis of 2008.
1:24.9	Shortly after that, Business Daily Stephen Ryan spoke to Sarah Bloom-Braskin.
1:29.7	She was, under President Barack Obama, a deputy treasury secretary and a Federal Reserve governor.
1:35.4	This is all significant for reasons of the timing of it, for reasons of the size of it,
1:41.6	and for reasons of the fact that the Fed is very low in terms of
	...

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