Welcome to the Real Vision Daily Briefing. I am the host today Ed Harrison and it is the 30th of July 2020.

We're going to be joined today by Mark Chandler

of Bannickburn Global 4X.

He's the chief market strategist there.

Very shortly, he's going to be on but first we're going to go to Nick

Korea who's going to tell us the story of the day. Thanks Ed. In Q2 of this year the US economy

contracted by a full 9.5%.

That's an annualized rate of 32.9%.

This decline in GDP is the sharpest the U.S. economy has faced since quarterly GDP record keeping began in the 40s.

And while the U.S. economy bounced back during the latter part of the second quarter,

more recently, the economic recovery has slowed due to an increase of the spread of the coronavirus as states and

municipalities reverse reopening plans. The GDP contraction was wide-ranging.

Business investments was down at an annualized pace of 27%, and residential investment dropped at 38.7%.

For household spending for services, the annualized drop was an astounding 43.5%.

And while employment, spending, and production data demonstrated more strength when the

U.S. economy reopened, reversals of that reopening are showing up as slowing in real-time

data sets, as the epidemic grows in severity in the U.S.

The v-shaped recovery is starting to look more and more like fantasy.

The disastrous Q2 GDP comes a day after Chairman Powell's warning that the future of the U.S. economy would, quote, depend significantly on the course of the virus, end quote.

What's more, the U.S. Department of Labor Unemployment Insurance Report, released this morning for last week's data, showed initial jobless claims increasing for the second week in a row to 1.43 million.

While employers added 7.5 million people to their payrolls in May and June,

payrolls are still down more than 14.5 million from their pre-lockdown levels,

...