At the start of 2020, according to all available data, more than ten years after the collapse of the Lehman Brothers sparked the greatest financial crisis and economic downturn since the Great Depression, none of the underlying contradictions of the world economy have been resolved. The false claim that governments have broken the back of the recession was running out of steam. Global imbalances and deep-rooted tensions have deepened even further. In a survey by the US National Association for Business Economics, published in August 2019, 72 per cent of economists predicted that a recession would occur before the end of 2021 (National Association for Business Economics 2019). In the second half of 2019, fears over the health of the global economy had deepened with the publication of international data. Global manufacturing output was actually falling, as measured by economists from JP Morgan, and

The Purchasing Managers’ indices for the service industries in the US, UK and Germany, published in October 2019, all turned out to be worse than economists had expected (Financial Times, 5/6 October 2019, 4). The UK economy saw no growth in the final three months of 2019; the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said that manufacturing had contracted for the third quarter in a row and the service sector had slowed. In particular, the car industry had seen a particularly weak quarter. The services sector – which accounts for more than three-quarters of the UK economy – grew by just 0.1 per cent in the final quarter of 2019, and the construction sector grew by 0.5 per cent.