(9 October 2020) During periods of high volatility (hello, coronavirus!) governments, investors, businesses, and households alike typically seek out safe assets to protect their savings. In the absence of a magical currency impervious to the volatility of recessions, the search for stability usual returns to none other than the modern day gold standard. For governments, especially in the period since the Great Recession, this translates into more aggressive and intentional accumulation of gold within their international reserves.
Setting aside the economic implications of a new gold standard, we sought to estimate countries' 'readiness' to convert currency in circulation into physical gold, which is the fundamental principle of a gold standard, by creating a Gold Standard 2.0 Readiness Index. The Index for mid 2020 shows that among the world's largest economies only Russia is more or less ready to fully implement a gold standard, needing to reduce the amount of currency in circulation by just 10% to be able to convert all of its currency in circulation into physical gold.
Live data and insights on Coronavirus around the world, including detailed statistics for the US, EU, and China — confirmed and recovered cases, deaths, alternative data on economic activities, customer behavior, supply chains, and more.
In August, US manufacturing activity contracted 2.1 points from July, the largest contraction in nearly three years. According to the Institute of Supply Management (ISM) Purchasing Manufacturing Index (PMI) - commonly referred to as the ISM manufacturing index - fell to 49.1, making the US a late comer to a growing club of large economies, such as China, the Eurozone, Japan, and the United Kingdom, that have likewise reported contracting manufacturing sectors in recent months. The PMI is being dragged down by a sharp decline in new orders, non-farm employment (which increased by...
Which is the world's largest economy, China or the United States? As is usual in the field of economics, “It depends.” It depends on the methods used to estimate the size of an economy and to compare one economy to another. Despite modern discussions on refining the calculation of gross domestic product (GDP), the standard measure of an economy’s size and performance, to be more inclusive of economic factors that have been ignored to date, such as environmental and natural resource depletion, there is no commonly accepted alternative to GDP. There are, however, at least two commonly...
For the first time during the post World War II era, the global economy is expected to shrink due to measures in force worldwide to suppress the coronavirus, according to the IMF World Economic Outlook (WEO) released on April 14, 2020. In this edition of the WEO, the IMF shortened the forecast horizon to 2021 instead of the expected 2025 horizon and limited the number of indicators available in its statistical tables because of the high level of uncertainty in current global economic conditions. In the baseline scenario—which assumes that the pandemic fades in the second half of...
It sounds like a riddle: how many Big Macs for your entire daily wage? Granted, many of our readers may not even have access to a Big Mac where they live (not to mention those who wouldn’t buy Big Macs if they were vegetarian, among other reasons). So, why is the Big Mac Index from the Economist a well-known concept around the world? It’s simple: Big Macs are easier for the overwhelming majority of the world’s population to understand as opposed to economic concepts like “GDP per capita in purchasing power parities,” which is a mouthful and a complicated concept. The answer to the...
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