It took just a few weeks in the first quarter of 2020 for the COVID-19 pandemic to profoundly impact life all over the world. In addition to the health aspect of this crisis, the global economic outlook has also taken a drastic hit. Indeed, in Europe, most countries took measures which effectively shut down their economies for 10-12 weeks. As economic activity quickly nose-dived, the EU published its Spring European Economic Forecast which predicted that economic output in Q2 2020 would be around 16% lower than in Q4 2019 and that the economic contraction in EU GDP in 2020 is expected to be 7½% meaning that it is set to be far deeper than during the financial crisis in 2009. Read more