The UK plunges into a technical recession for the first time since 2009. British GDP is in fact down for the second consecutive quarter, and that of the second quarter of this year it is the most marked loss in percentage terms in history: -20,4%, worse than what Italy and France did, in line with the Spanish tumble. In the first quarter of 2020, already partly affected by the global health emergency, the UK's GDP had dropped by 2,2%. The Office for National Statistics has ruled that for the British economy this is "the worst recession on record".
It is not doing much better, as we know, for other Western economies. Germany itself, which has introduced less restrictive measures to contain the spread of Covid-19, recorded a -10% drop in the second quarter, which was in turn the most significant drop since statistics began in the Teutonic country in 1970. The Italian GDP instead it lost 17,3% on an annual basis, returning to 1995 levels but still doing better than forecasts. Not to mention the fall in US gross domestic product, plummeted 32%, never this bad since 1947.
