Friday , March 29 2024
Home / The Angry Bear / The Four big coincident indicators as of the end of 2020

The Four big coincident indicators as of the end of 2020

Summary:
The Four big coincident indicators as of the end of 2020 All of the important economic data for 2020 has already been released. In this final week only November house prices and one last week of jobless claims remain. So this is a good time to take a look at the current state of the economy as it has unfolded in this pandemic year. The 4 most important components in the NBER’s toolkit for calling recessions and expansions are real sales, real income, production, and employment. With the exception of manufacturers’ and wholesalers’ sales, all of the above components, including retail sales, have already been released through November. Let’s take a look: Figure one The onset of the pandemic in March is really obvious, and the outsized

Topics:
NewDealdemocrat considers the following as important: ,

This could be interesting, too:

Joel Eissenberg writes You can’t fool Mother Nature

Angry Bear writes Correcting 11 Washington Post’s Charts That Are Supposed to Tell How the Economy Changed Since Covid

NewDealdemocrat writes A detailed look at manufacturing, and an update on freight

Angry Bear writes Alternate Ports for Shipments

The Four big coincident indicators as of the end of 2020

All of the important economic data for 2020 has already been released. In this final week only November house prices and one last week of jobless claims remain.

So this is a good time to take a look at the current state of the economy as it has unfolded in this pandemic year.

The 4 most important components in the NBER’s toolkit for calling recessions and expansions are real sales, real income, production, and employment. With the exception of manufacturers’ and wholesalers’ sales, all of the above components, including retail sales, have already been released through November. Let’s take a look:


The Four big coincident indicators as of the end of 2020


Figure one

The onset of the pandemic in March is really obvious, and the outsized distortions, first to the downside, and then to the upside, continued through July. In the last 3 months, the gains have slowed dramatically, and in November two of the four components went negative.


Norming each of the four components to 100 as of February shows that sales have actually made new highs since then, and income (thanks to the emergency stimulus) is only slightly below February’s level. But production and employment are still at quite depressed levels:


The Four big coincident indicators as of the end of 2020


As of this morning (Dec 28), Trump finally signed the supplemental stimulus passed by Congress, but only after the unemployed lost one week of benefits.


While it is a mistake to project coincident trends forward, my expectation is that with the pandemic at its worst, more deterioration of the 4 coincident components of the economy is likely before the effect of vaccination and coherent Federal policy under the incoming Biden Administration make their mark.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *