IMF secures naming rights over 'The Great Lockdown' to send grim warning to world leaders

The IMF has secured naming rights over the unfolding global economic recession amid the closure of factories, offices and shops to contain the deadly Covid-17 threat.

Calling it ‘The Great Lockdown’, the IMF is seeking to capture the unprecedented threats facing jobs and prosperity that numbers alone cannot do. Giving the crisis a name is also a deliberate piece of messaging to world leaders.

Its outlook is a call to arms for them to collaborate and to spend on healthcare and business supports. “This crisis is like no other,” says the IMF in its outlook.

The fallout of the Great Lockdown will inflict the greatest economic pain since the Great Depression, it says. The tone of the report is also remarkable: Gone are references to austerity, so familiar of IMF reports during the bailout programmes for Ireland and elsewhere. It recommends governments pay “survivor” grants to healthcare workers and their families fighting the virus. And the Washington-based fund even gets close to a rebuke for the White House, urging unnamed policymakers to turn away from “futile” protectionist policies.

Its forecasts make grim reading. Unsurprisingly for Europe, it projects that GDP in Italy and Spain will be hard bit and says Spanish unemployment will soar to almost 21% this year. In Ireland, it sees the economy enduring an economic blow but similar in scale to most of the rest of the eurozone.

However, it projects unemployment here will average over 12% this year, levels much higher than it forecasts for the UK and Germany. And average figures do not tell the story of how sharply jobless levels will peak.