Covid-19 impact: German economy shrinks by record 9.7% in second quarter

The German economy contracted by a record 9.7% in the second quarter as consumer spending, company investments and exports all collapsed at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the statistics office said on Tuesday.
 

The economic slump was much stronger than during the financial crisis more than a decade ago, and it represented the sharpest decline since Germany began to record quarterly GDP calculations in 1970, the office said.
 

Still, the reading marked a minor upward revision from an earlier estimate for the April-June period of -10.1% that the office had published last month.
 

Consumer spending shrank by 10.9% on