Prospects for a quick global economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic are officially dead, with all major international financial institutions and private forecasters now projecting huge cumulative losses and an uneven, prolonged climb out of the world’s steepest recession in 80 years. Economic models have proven incapable of dealing with uncertainties and discontinuities of the current unprecedented global lockdown. But even though magnitudes vary, recent forecasts are headed in the same direction — down. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) now expects a cumulative $12.5 trillion economic loss from COVID-19 in 2020-2021, with a 4.9 percent fall in global production this year and a 5.4 percent recovery in 2021. The IMF also presumes that the strength of the recovery remains “highly uncertain,” and that a potential second wave of global infections in 2021 would result in an additional 2.5% decline in economic growth that year.