US Economy Shrinks as IMF Warns of Great Depression

(Agence France Presse)

The US economy shrank in the third quarter, official data confirmed Tuesday, as the IMF’s top economist warned of a second Great Depression offering no respite from relentless gloom ahead of Christmas.

The abrupt 0.5-percent contraction of gross domestic product (GDP) in the world’s largest economy was seen as marking the start of a steep downturn for the United States after GPD growth of 2.8 percent in the second quarter.

Stocks on Wall Street rose in early trading however as the contraction had been expected and was unrevised from a previous estimate. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 0.54 percent and the Nasdaq rose 0.60 percent.

“This report is largely old news,” said John Ryding at RDQ Economics, who forecast fourth-quarter data out next month would be far bleaker.

“Given signs that the recession has deepened in the current quarter, we look for around a 6.0 percent drop in real GDP,” he said.

Britain’s economy also shrank by 0.6 percent in the three months to September compared to the previous quarter, against a previous estimate of 0.5-percent contraction, the Office for National Statistics said.

Britain and the United States will be in recession if their economies contract again in the fourth quarter, according to the traditional definition of a recession as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth.

The IMF’s top economist, Olivier Blanchard, maintained that governments around the world should boost domestic demand in order to avoid another Great Depression similar to the global downturn that shook the world in the 1930s.

“Consumer and business confidence indexes have never fallen so far since they began. The coming months will be very bad,” Blanchard said in an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde. Read more here.