The U.S. economy will remain weak for years under current spending and tax policies, while unemployment will remain above pre-pandemic levels for as long as a decade, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has forecast.
The ten-year economic scenario has “deteriorated significantly” since the agency’s last predictions in January.
The U.S. economy will grow quickly in this year’s third quarter but growth will be 3.4 percent lower over the next decade than before the economic shutdown, the agency predicted. It calculates unemployment to average 6.1 percent over the period instead of the 4.2 percent it had foreseen six months ago.
The CBO’s projections, however, “are subject to an unusually high degree of uncertainty” because no one can know how long social distancing will be enforced or how long the pandemic will last, whether Congress will extend or cut social safety nets for businesses and people without jobs, and how effective massive federal stimulus programs will be, the agency noted.
TREND FORECAST: We maintain our forecast that the “Greatest Depression” has begun. Any economic rebound will be temporary. What is also being discounted by the media is the fact, as reported in the Trends Journal, that the global economy was in sharp slowdown prior to the COVID War that destroyed much more of it.
