By the end of March, the present economic crisis was already historically unprecedented. Never before had governments across the world shut economies down to impose a quarantine on the healthy and sick alike, and never before had central banks turned themselves into, as one investor quipped about the Federal Reserve, the “lender of all resorts”.
This economic emergency has also inverted the relationship between energy costs and falling production. Since the Second World War recessions in Western economies have generally come after a surge in oil prices. This one has arrived after they declined in the first months of this year, and following nearly six years of prices better suited to consumers than producers.
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