Things Are Even Worse Than They Seem for Emerson Electric

Like so many companies reporting lately, Emerson Electric 's (NYSE: EMR) most recent earnings results weren't exactly sterling. The coronavirus's impact on the global economy has been widespread. However, the company's efforts to rein in investor expectations by lowering its full-year guidance doesn't do justice to the problems the industrial giant faces. Here's a deeper dive that shows the full extent of what Emerson was telling investors.

The global effort to slow the spread of COVID-19 has largely centered around asking people to stay home and forcing nonessential businesses to close. Effectively, large swaths of the world have been economically shut down for an extended period of time. The impact is already starting to show up in the GDP numbers, with the U.S. falling from an annualized growth rate of 2.1% in Q4 2019 to a decline of 4.8% in Q1 2020. And the United States wasn't even shuttered for the whole quarter. Worse, economists expect the decline to steepen as the data sets involved get finalized in the coming weeks and months. The U.S. isn't alone.

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