Jakob Funk Kirkegaard, Senior Fellow at Peterson Institute for International Economics shares his view on COVID-19’s impact on the US society. Nordic Summit is a recurring annual event for Danske Bank’s corporate and institutional clients. 

Through Nordic Summit 2020 - this year transformed into a series of virtual sessions - Danske Bank sheds light on the current COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences for the global economy and the society as a whole.

The session is moderated by Jakob Ekholdt Christensen, Head of International Macro and Emerging Market Research, and Thomas Harr, Global Head of FI&C Research at Danske Bank. 

Watch a recap

Key-takeaways from Funk Kierkegaard

• There are real social and economic fallouts from the lockdown measures. A new survey shows that 40% of all households earning less than $40,000 in the United States (roughly a third of the total population) have now lost their main source of household income.
  
  
• Another survey shows that approximately a quarter of American households felt that they had too little money to purchase the food that they would like to purchase.
  
  
• We are dependent on the Congress to continue to appropriate the money to save those people. This is not as easy as it was earlier in the pandemic, as a number of Republican senators are against spending more money.
  
  
• Regarding the possible re-election of Donald Trump, there has  - since his election - been a very significant increase in "unthusiasm" on the Democratic side - they truly and viscerally hate him. It is therefore a unlikely scenario that Trump will be re-elected, as the election in 2016 was also much more Hillary Clinton that lost rather than Donald Trump who won.