Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund is predicting so-called “developed” countries will see their economies decline for the first time since the Second World War. IMF economist Jorg Decressin predicts the economic contraction will be the worst since the early 1990s.

Jorg Decressin: “This is the first time in a post-war period that output in the advanced economies will contract. Now, what you have to bear in mind is that — over a year, on a full-year basis. What you have to bear in mind, though, is that in the course of the last forty years potential growth of advanced economies has been slowly diminishing, and the reason is, for example, slow population growth, but there are also other reasons. Now, if you measure the slowdown in growth, relative to potential, then what we are expecting to happen is not worse than, for example, what happened in '82, but it's going to be worse than what happened in the early ’90s.”