U.K. Registers Record 20.4% Drop in GDP in Second Quarter
CRASH AND BURN
Britain’s locked-down economy shrank by a record 20.4 percent between April and June and has now officially entered a recession, official figures published Wednesday showed. British Finance Minister Rishi Sunak gave a gloomy assessment of the data, saying, “Hundreds of thousands of people have already lost their jobs, and sadly in the coming months many more will.” The second-quarter slump in GDP in the world’s sixth-biggest economy massively exceeded the 12.1 percent drop in the euro zone and the 9.5 percent quarter-on-quarter fall in the U.S. One glimmer of hope was that GDP in June grew by 8.7 percent compared to May as the country began to open up its economy. “The recession brought on by the coronavirus pandemic has led to the biggest fall in quarterly GDP on record,” the Office for National Statistics said.