Hello, you're very welcome to Longreads, a Jacobin podcast where you look in

depth at political topics and thinkers. My name is Daniel Finn and a

features editor here at Jacobin, and I'll be presenting the show. The COVID-19

pandemic hasn't just been an unprecedented global health crisis. It also had

profound implications for the world economy.

The new data from China that presents a troubling picture just shows you already

by late March 2020. CNBC is reporting on China's economic downturn as a

foretaste of what might be coming for the rest of the world.

Welcome, Leeland Miller. So what do you think? A drop of 11 percent, I guess it's

not entirely surprising, given how China really clamped down and shut the

economy down in response to coronavirus. You should have been expecting first

quarter weakness. I don't think people were expecting double-digit weakness. And

you know, when we work through our numbers, you know, we're getting to a to a level

of weakness. We just never seen before. We're talking every sector weaker, every

region weaker, every headline metric weaker, and not just weaker, but in

contraction. So this is this is a this is a new area with uncharted waters. We've

never seen anything like this before. The spread of the virus in 2020 shattered

the complacency of the world economic forum at Davos as Liz Hoffman of the Wall

Street Journal explained in the following report. You have CEOs from some of

the biggest companies in the world, heads of state, president was there. I don't

remember anyone taking coronavirus seriously. Everyone's always enthusiastic

at Davos. No one makes friends there by predicting doom and gloom. It seems to

...