Will the recent banking chaos lead to an economic crash?

things change. Not long ago analysts thought the global economy was powering ahead; now they worry about a deep recession caused by fallout from the banking turmoil. “From no landing to hard landing”, as Torsten Slok of Apollo Global Management, an asset manager, has written. Analysts at JPMorgan Chase—better at economics than metaphors, one hopes—say that “a soft landing now looks unlikely, with the airplane in a tailspin (lack of market confidence) and engines about to turn off (bank lending)”. Evidence from before the suggested global was increasing at an annualised rate of 3%. In rich countries, job markets were on fire. So far there is scant evidence of a shift in “real-time” data towards slower growth. A “current-activity indicator” produced by Goldman Sachs, a bank, derived from a variety of high-frequency measures, looks steady. Purchasing-manager indices showed a slight improvement in March. Weekly measures of produced by the , a rich-country club, are holding up. , another bank, tracks global growth as priced by financial markets (in prices of oil and cyclical shares, for example). This currently indicates growth of 3.4%, versus 3.7% before () collapsed.