Will The Current Quarter Be The Worst?

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Mar 30, 2:04PM EDT · Published Mar 3, 6:38AM EST

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

The IMF said that this year will be bad, but it is being accused of being too optimistic.

According to Reuters, “The global economic downturn will be considerably deeper than even the International Monetary Fund forecast a month ago, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s chief economist Klaus Schmidt-Hebbel said.

The OECD believes that IMF projections that global GDP will grow .5% this year worldwide are well off the mark. The organization also said it thinks this quarter will be the worst of the downturn.

That, of course, is a guess, and a bad one at that. Unemployment in developed nations is almost certainly to grow because of losses at businesses. If exports from China continue to slow, that huge economy could begin to post negative GDP. If credit remains locked down in the US and Europe, the second and third quarters could get much worse than the first.

Nice guess. No dice.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.