The initial economic shock of COVID-19 was synchronized. The recovery will be anything but.

The pandemic is causing the world's economies to diverge.

The pandemic is going to leave economies less globalised, more digitized, and less equal.

You know, it just feels like a completely different world.

It is so unique, and the usual playbook doesn't apply.

Firms are not going to unlearn what they learned over this period. Rather than trying to restore yesterday's economy,

governments have to adapt to the changes that are taking place.

We are still so far from being out of the woods.

You're listening to Money Talks from Economist Radio, our weekly

podcast on the markets, the economy and the world of business. I'm Rachnushanbogue,

the Economist Finance Editor, and this week how COVID-19 is recasting the global economic order.

In February, the coronavirus pandemic struck the global economy with the biggest shock since the Second World War.

Whole countries locked down. World trade shuddered. Consumer spending slumped and the

labor market imploded as nearly 500 million full-time jobs disappeared almost

overnight. In response, Central Banks and governments have stretched their mandates and their deficits beyond all previously imagined limits,

in order to avoid even deeper catastrophe.

The pandemic has exceeded in economic effect what models of pandemics

before this year suggested might happen.

Henry Kerr is our economics editor and the author of a recent special report on the economic winners and losers of the pandemic.

So the most sophisticated modeling of a pandemic before this year was based on forecasts for a Spanish flu type

pandemic and it was thought that that might kill something in the region of 70 million

people and reduce GDP by 5% but what we've had this year is a death toll that's much lighter than that in the scheme of things,

...