Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has a grim diagnosis for the United States economy: The condition will get worse before it gets better.
Two weeks after Mnuchin predicted the economy would reopen in June and “bounce back” to normal, the Treasury head is now predicting that most businesses are “going to have a very, very bad second quarter.” Mnuchin made the remarks in an interview with Fox News Sunday following a dismal employment situation report from the Department of Labor that showed national unemployment at 14.7%.
Mnuchin’s current expectations and his earlier prediction are indicative of the lack of certainty in the main theory of what the end of the coronavirus’s impact will look like. The prevailing expectation is that once the coronavirus is over, whenever that comes, the world economy will come bouncing back to the growth levels initially expected for 2020. The International Monetary Fund predicted something like this in April: Specifically, the prediction was that COVID-19 quarantines would lead to a global economic recession of 3% before rebounding in 2021 to 5.8% growth.
In practice, though, it’s still unclear as to whether or not the initial impact of the COVID-19 virus on businesses is actually over yet or not. That’s led to tense confrontations between workers, businesses, government officials, and public health experts broadly concerned with the unknowable answer to the risks inherent to reopening for business in an ambiguously dangerous environment.
The Coronavirus is Transforming Automotive and Industrial Supply Chains
One of the lingering assessments of the coronavirus, from the start, has been how quickly it exposed the fragility of modern supply chain systems. It is all but certain that post-quarantine supply chains will look different from the ones that were crippled when the virus first began to shut down entire countries’ economies.
Salim Shaikh and Ehab Sabri, Ph.D. discuss technologies future customers can use to proactively address potential risks to supply chains, mitigating unseen risks, and planning for unexpected scenarios. “Amidst such uncertainty, it is critical that companies take a comprehensive approach and develop a range of scenarios and robust contingency plans,” they write. Read the full story here.
Tesla Resumes Feud with Local Officials
In March, IndustryWeek reported on the first COVID-19 related conflict between Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, and the local county health officials of Fremont, California, the site of Tesla’s headquarters and main domestic vehicle manufacturing plant. Now, Elon Musk has sued the county for imposing stricter requirements on area factories than California Governor Gavin Newsom and vowed to take Tesla’s headquarters out of the state to Texas or Nevada.
“This is the last straw,” Musk tweeted. Musk had intended to open the Fremont factory on Friday, May 9, but county officials say they were already in productive negotiations with Tesla executives to reopen the plant May 18, a week later. Read the full story here.
