From Bloomberg, Matthews and Shah, “The high-frequency chart shows that the US economy started to weaken from Delta”:
According to some high-frequency reports that showed weakness in August, the delta variable inhibited the progress of the U.S. economy’s recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, consumers delayed some leisure spending, and companies delayed the return to normal operations.
The Bloomberg article includes two pictures:
For certain types of activities, other high-frequency indicators give mixed information. Google Mobile Trends (August 24) shows that the number of retail and entertainment and transit stations has declined in recent weeks. Apple mobile trends Indicates that driving has declined in recent weeks (but still above the baseline).
Other broad macroeconomic indicators show that overall growth has slowed but continued to grow during the weekend ending on August 21, as shown by Lewis, Mertens, and Stock Weekly Economic Index.
source: Lewis, Daniel J., Mertens, Karel and Stock, James H., Weekly Economic Index (Lewis-Mertens-Stock) [WEI], Taken from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WEI, August 28, 2021.
Other indicators such as The Philadelphia Fed’s Coincidence Index Just released in July, and Baumeister et al.Weekly economic status indicators Currently, only data before 7/31 is used for updating.
Researchers Herzon, Prakken and Goel of IHS-MarkIt (8/25) found that the number of cases had a significant negative impact on county-level expenditures, and wrote:
According to data from Opportunity Insights Economic Tracker, from the week ending July 4 to the week ending August 1, the total spending on credit and debit cards of American consumers fell by 7.6%. Using the above calculations, we estimate that 1.4 percentage points (or about one-fifth) of the decline can be attributed to the increase in the number of COVID-19 cases. Although important, the magnitude of this contribution suggests that most of the decline in expenditures in July (about four-fifths) was caused by other reasons; things that have nothing to do with the rising number of cases.
To be sure, the analysis predicted that the increase in the number of cases will drag consumer spending on consumer spending will depend on the increase in the number of cases. When we collected data for this analysis, we had only one week of county-level cases after the sample ended in July. Using the estimated regression from the July sample and applying the method here, we estimate that the number of cases in each county in the week as of August 8 further increased by 0.7 percentage points from the total expenditure, and the cumulative effect was -2.1 percentage points. If the number of cases continues to rise, these effects will intensify, but according to our estimates, it will not be enough to put a broad economic recovery at risk.
