Counties with rising death rates account for an increasing proportion of GDP, with slight changes A few weeks ago.
optimal: The share of GDP from counties where new cases (dark blue) and deaths (light blue) have increased. bottom: GDP in billions of dollars in 2012, SAAR (blue).Source: DB, Covid Impact Tracker, August 19, 2021, and IHS-MarkIt, Released on August 2, 2021.
I superimposed the two pictures together so that people can understand the relationship between the waves and the speed of recovery. It is difficult to see a clear pattern, except in the first wave, the decline in the affected counties is related to the rapid recovery of economic activity, as measured by the monthly GDP estimated by IHS-MarkIt.
On August 18, Goldman Sachs lowered its third-quarter growth forecast from 9% to 5.5%, partly due to concerns about delta variables. Yesterday, Wells Fargo observed:
Delta variants cast shadows on the foreground
The American Delta variant casts a shadow over the foreground. The number of new cases per day continues to rise, reaching the highest level since February. Under more severe pressure, the number of hospitalizations is also increasing. This week there were reports that intensive care beds in some states were close to full capacity. From an economic point of view, with the surge in cases starting in late July, it remains to be seen how activities evolve during this latest outbreak.High-frequency measurements of seated diners and the number of people passing through TSA checkpoints indicate that service activities have stabilized, but there has been no substantial deterioration so far (see chart). The sideways activity, coupled with lower-than-expected retail sales in July, indicates that our estimates of personal spending in the third quarter have downside risks.
So far, the impact has been a moderate drop in the predicted growth rate, not a sharp drop.
Implied annual growth rate as of August 19 (13-week average) Weekly Economic Index (WEI) The hypothetical quarter ended August 14 was 9.53%. Nationwide, this is still strong growth.
