The FINANCIAL — On April 6, the IMF indicated that COVID-19 will cause more economic damage than the global financial crisis. The IMF now expects the world to dip into recession in 2020. The WTO forecasts the trade slump in 2020 to exceed declines observed during the global financial crisis. Search trends on google support these assertions.
Google trends data[1] from March 2020 shows that COVID-19 has led to the highest ever search rate for terms on the “foreign exchange” topic, which points to rising exchange rate pressures and volatility (see chart: Global). This data supports the assertion that we are likely to have experienced the most sudden withdrawal of capital from emerging markets in recent history.
Had central banks across emerging economies, including Brazil, India, Indonesia and South Africa not intervened to prop-up local currencies, we would likely have seen much higher numbers of google searches on the foreign exchange topic.
All five of the Eurasian Economic Union members (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Armenia) made the list of top ten countries with the highest rate of google searches on the topic of foreign exchange. Other countries that are also on this list include: Tajikistan, Ukraine, Moldova, Uzbekistan and United Arab Emirates.
