EU and USA in trouble

A mind-boggling €1.5 trillion ($ 1.63 trillion) would be needed to keep the European Union afloat and enable it to survive the COVID-19 pandemic devastating the continent, high EU official said.

The European commissioner for economy, Paolo Gentiloni, has warned ahead of the EU leaders summit on the coronavirus crisis, that the European Union urgently needs financial injections to “deal with this crisis”.
The commissioner said that Europe is going through the “worst crisis” since WWII, which threatens the very existence of the EU as a single economic and political entity. Gentiloni cited an International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecast, saying the EU could see an unprecedented 7.5 percent drop in GDP this year. In 2009, during the global financial crisis, the EU’s GDP fell by only 4.4 percent.

In the US the travel industry has lost a full third of all the jobs and is experiencing a total impact from coronavirus that is nine times greater than the 9/11 attacks, according to new data released by the U.S. Travel Association and the analytics firm Tourism Economics.

By the end of April, declines in travel will cause eight million jobs to be lost out of approximately 24 million for the entire U.S. economy, according to the report. Travel spending losses are on track to top half a trillion dollars by the end of 2020.

“The relief package was a good start, but the data shows there is still extreme and mounting pain in the American travel industry,” said U.S. Travel Association President and CEO Roger Dow. “We’re appealing for fixes, the addition of more relief, faster rules, and greater flexibility.”

MMP
photo: spiegel.de