The International Monetary Fund warned on Tuesday that the world economy will likely contract this year in a “Great Recession”. Growth will slow to zero or below this year, and African leaders are woeful this will undo hard-won social-economic gains.
Lesley Wroughton and George Obulutsa for Yahoo Finance report that IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said in a speech that deleveraging by financial institutions and a collapse in consumer and business confidence is depressing domestic demand across the globe.
Companies are shoring up and cutting production in an effort to reduce inventory to cope with the recession. The Associated Press reports that wholesale inventories fell 0.7% in January, which was slightly smaller than the 1% fall economists had expected.
This is the fifth month in a row that businesses have cut inventory and sales at the wholesale level dropped 2.9% in January, the seventh consecutive decline.