Kendra_Smith_Laughs’s Reviews > Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy > Status Update
Kendra_Smith_Laughs
is on page 258 of 368
"Since 1959 the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the part of the World Bank organization that makes loans to low- and middle-income countries, had enjoyed a triple-A credit rating. On April 15, 2020, the day of the G20 agreement on the DSSI, the IBRD was (...) raising $8 billion in five-year bonds, at a yield of 0.704 percent. (...) the largest and cheapest fundraising exercise ever"
— Jun 09, 2025 07:42AM
Like flag
Kendra_Smith_Laughs’s Previous Updates
Kendra_Smith_Laughs
is on page 301 of 368
"Any of these vectors of global change - environmental, economic, political, geopolitical - by themselves would suggest that far from being a culmination, 2020 is merely a moment in a process of escalation. Taken together, they form a dynamic parallelogram that makes de-escalation hard if not impossible to imagine. The great acceleration continues."
— Jun 17, 2025 10:53AM
Kendra_Smith_Laughs
is on page 280 of 368
"Fortunately for the EU, Trump's analogues in Europe were in a weak position. Hungary and Poland needed the EU's money."
— Jun 14, 2025 03:27AM
Kendra_Smith_Laughs
is on page 276 of 368
"Between November 2020 and January 2021, the United States lived through a profound national political crisis. The only other Western nation to experience anything similar was the UK. Brexit and Trump's presidency were born together in 2016. There was a painful symmetry about their ending together too."
— Jun 11, 2025 10:41AM
Kendra_Smith_Laughs
is on page 269 of 368
"The abundance of dollars underwrote the market-based system of global credit and deferred the kind of crisis that might force a general reckoning. Only a tightening of U.S. monetary policy would expose the real constraints on low-income borrowers. That would be decided not in Côte d'Ivoire or Kenya, but in the United States, between Wall Street and Washington, D.C."
— Jun 10, 2025 06:19AM
Kendra_Smith_Laughs
is on page 243 of 368
"If it had chosen to do so, Germany could have borrowed the funds necessary to meet not just the immediate needs of COVAX, but the entire projected cost of vaccinating the world - estimated, as of May 2020, at $25 billion - and it could have done so at negative interest rates. Instead, it chipped in €500 million and waited for others to do their bit. The same logic (...) applied to (...) the G20.
— Jun 07, 2025 03:11AM
Kendra_Smith_Laughs
is on page 240 of 368
"In a summer of Black Lives Matter protests, with Black and Latino patients dying of Covid-related problems at a much higher rate than white patients, the diversity of the trial populations was a key concern. In late August, Operation Warp Speed officials realized that the Moderna trial population was far too white. At the last minute, funds had to be mobilized to recruit minority volunteers."
— Jun 05, 2025 10:34AM
Kendra_Smith_Laughs
is on page 225 of 368
"The 2020 election translated into politics what were increasingly stark divides in American society along economic, social, regional, and cultural lines. (...) Biden won only 509 counties, but they were home to 60 percent of America's population and generated 71 percent of national output. Trump was left with the rest."
— Jun 05, 2025 08:19AM
Kendra_Smith_Laughs
is on page 224 of 368
"When Trump was put on the spot by a friendly Fox News anchor about what he actually wanted to achieve in a second term, he had no answer. At its national convention, the GOP simply did without a manifesto."
— Jun 04, 2025 10:48AM
Kendra_Smith_Laughs
is on page 209 of 368
"China was not predicted to become number one until the mid-2030s. That is until 2020. The differential impact of the coronavirus crisis forced forecasters to revise their predictions. By the end of the year, China was expected to overtake the U.S. GDP five years sooner, possibly as early as 2028-29. Certainly, by the 2030s, China would dominate East Asia."
— Jun 04, 2025 09:40AM
Kendra_Smith_Laughs
is on page 208 of 368
"The year 2020 dealt a savage blow to India's pretensions to Asian leadeship. Delhi's coronavirus response was botched. Tens of millions were hurled into destitution. India's economic contraction was among the worst in the world. When Indian and Chinese soldiers clashed in the Himalayas in June, in the worst border violence since 1975, it did not end well for the Indians."
— Jun 04, 2025 08:16AM
