DWS | How bad could things get for corporate earnings, both in the U.S. and worldwide? In the face of a global health emergency, the short answer is that it remains hard to tell. Large parts of the world are under Covid-19 lockdown, delivering tremendous short-term shocks to the supply side and threatening to bring demand destruction on a massive scale. The disruptions will be comparable or worse than after September 11, 2001 and the onset of the financial crisis in 2008.