THE PANDEMIC caused a fearsome economic slump, but now a weird, exhilarating boom is in full swing. The oil price has soared, while restaurants and haulage firms are having to fight and flatter to recruit staff. As listed firms signal that profits will hit an all-time high this year, stockmarkets are on a tear. An index produced by JPMorgan Chase and IHS Markit suggests that global growth is at its highest since the exuberant days of 2006.
Any escape from covid-19 is a cause for celebration. But today’s booming economy is also a source of anxiety, because three fault lines lie beneath the surface. Together, they will determine who prospers, and whether the most unusual recovery in living memory can be sustained.
The first fault line divides the jabs from the jab-nots. Only those countries getting vaccinations into arms will be able to tame covid-19. That is the condition for shops, bars and offices to reopen permanently, and customers and workers to have the confidence to leave their homes. But only one in four people around the world has had a first dose of vaccine and only one in eight is fully protected. Even in America some under-vaccinated states are vulnerable to the infectious Delta variant of the virus.
The second fault line runs between supply and demand. Shortages of microchips have disrupted the manufacture of electronics and cars just when consumers want to binge on them. The cost of shipping goods from China to ports on America’s west coast has quadrupled from its pre-pandemic level. Even as these bottlenecks are unblocked, newly open economies will create fresh imbalances. In some countries people seem keener to go for a drink than they do to work behind the bar, causing a structural labour shortage in the service sector. House prices have surged, suggesting that rents will soon start to rise, too. That could sustain inflation and deepen the sense that housing is unaffordable.
The final fault line is over the withdrawal of stimulus. At some point, the state interventions that began last year must be reversed. Rich-world central banks have bought assets worth over $10trn since the pandemic began and are nervously considering how to extricate themselves without causing a flap in capital markets by tightening too fast. China, whose economy did not shrink in 2020, offers a sign of what is to come: it has tightened credit policy this year, slowing its growth.
Meanwhile, emergency government-aid schemes, such as unemployment-insurance top-ups and eviction moratoriums, are beginning to expire. Households are unlikely to get a fresh infusion of “stimmies” in 2022. Deficits will contract rather than expand, dragging down growth. So far, economies have largely avoided a wave of damaging bankruptcies but nobody knows…
Read More: The new fault lines on which the world economy rests