Thank you for the excellent question. This is one that we will consistently wrestle with.
Briefly to your first point, I won't give a market forecast. I'll give you an economic forecast—at least based on our economics team—and certainly it's a depressing environment.
These forecasts we hope are negative and will be revised upward over time. For the moment, we see that Canada is in a very sharp recession and likely will grow negative seven-plus per cent this year, but hopefully will bounce back 8% next year. Similarly, the U.S. is over 6% negative for this year, and globally, we see 3.8% negative growth for this year.
It's a very sharp recovery. We predict at the moment that the economy won't recover to its full pre-COVID level of output around the world until the second half of 2022. That is our current prediction. We're looking at it very carefully, based on the employment forecast, based on hopefully a little more optimism around vaccine research, but that's our current prediction.
To your point on asset prices and how they may have moved given the stimulus, that's certainly something that I think, in the short term, a lot of people are taking quite a lot of relief from. There has been a huge stimulus around the world, both on the fiscal front and on the monetary front, and it has had its impacts, certainly for most of the time. Although we've had a difficult day today in markets, most of the time it's put liquidity back into markets and put confidence back into markets.
You are right that it is possible this will result in very high asset prices. Certainly we've seen a very surprising and very rapid rise in equity markets, until this morning. We've certainly seen very little fall-off in real asset prices in many markets. While that is comforting as an owner of assets, it is something we are looking at very carefully, making sure we have a portfolio that will perform no matter what happens, no matter what risks emerge and no matter what events might happen.
We consistently stress test for what would happen if there were another scenario like the global financial crisis tomorrow. What happens if there is something even worse than that tomorrow? It's certainly something we don't wish for, but it is our responsibility to make sure we understand what the consequences of that would be and to make sure the portfolio would be safe even through those types of events.