Will coronavirus destroy the global economy?

Leading economists have warned of a 2020 crash for years

Question: Will coronavirus destroy the global economy?
Position‹4 of 4: Global economic collapse has been coming for some time
Argument1 of 2›: Leading economists have warned of a 2020 crash for years

Field experts from former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, to Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, have long said a global economic crash is on its way.

The argument

Even before coronavirus hit, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom were all on the cusp of recession, with many other economies experiencing significant slowdowns. Global debt had already skyrocketed, with debt to GDP rates being higher than immediately before the 2008 financial crisis. Growth in 2020 was already forecast to decline significantly. Additionally, even far before the downturn, China had specifically been theorised to be the epicentre of the next financial crisis. A 2020 recession had even been forecast by many. Coronavirus is simply the catalyst that has sped up economic downturn, rather than having caused it. The economic crash we are experiencing is inevitable.

Premises

[P1]Even before coronavirus, Germany, Japan, and the UK were on the cusp of recession, with global debt-to-GDP higher than before the 2008 crisis. [P2] Growth in 2020 was already forecast to decline, and many economists had specifically predicted a 2020 recession, with China theorised as its epicentre. [P3] Coronavirus is therefore only the catalyst that sped up an already-inevitable downturn, not its cause. [C] Therefore, because leading economists warned of a 2020 crash for years, global economic collapse has been coming for some time.

Counter-arguments

Pre-existing weakness is not the same as inevitable collapse. Late-cycle economies often carry high debt and slowing growth for years without tipping into a downturn, and 'a recession is coming' had been predicted repeatedly through the long post-2009 expansion without materialising — forecasters' record at calling turning points is poor, so the existence of 2020 warnings shows concern, not destiny. The scale and, crucially, the timing of the 2020 contraction were driven by a specific exogenous shock: the pandemic and the lockdowns that shut down activity almost overnight, producing a sharp, synchronised collapse quite unlike the mild cyclical slowdown the pre-Covid data pointed to. Absent the virus, the most those indicators supported was a modest recession, not the deepest global contraction since the Depression. That some vulnerability pre-dated the pandemic may have deepened the fall, but it does not show the collapse 'had been coming' independently of coronavirus, which the sibling positions identify as the decisive cause.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] High debt and a late-cycle slowdown are chronic conditions many economies carry for years without collapsing, so they do not make a crash inevitable. [Rejecting P2] Recessions had been forecast repeatedly through the 2010s without occurring, and the 2020 crash's timing and severity trace to the pandemic shock, not the pre-existing slowdown.