The last time I gave a speech at the Kisaragi-kai meeting last December, I referred to the remark by Christine Lagarde, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), that the global economy is showing "the broadest-based recovery in the last 10 years."
Current Economic Situation and Outlook In the first half of this year, the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic and the mitigation efforts put in place to contain it delivered the most severe blow to the U.S. economy since the Great Depression.