Apple announced today it is closing some stores due to Coronavirus.
You can see the immediate impact on the stock market here:
Case data will still matter. If the state doesn’t shut down things, businesses will from a fear of liability. Casinos in AZ are also closing due to a spike in cases.
The data in AZ and other states is getting much worse.
This has serious implications for the economy if it continues.
One of the difficulties of the current recession is how fast it is moving. It has forced economics to find new higher frequency data to try and estimate both the impact and the recovery.
A few weeks ago, I used Apple data to try to estimate the recovery. It showed that driving was back to normal. However, that seemed not true to be based on traffic on Google and what I was seeing.
Here is a graph comparing the year-over-year change gasoline deliveries (i.e. demand) vs. the Apple data.
You can see that they kind of match until the last few weeks. There is no way driving can be back to normal but gas demand is down.
So what’s the issue? There are two:
It’s important to understand your data so you can interpret it properly.