Another 2.4 million jobless claims. Old new. The real question is how the recovery is going.
It’s been 3 weeks since states started to reopen. Let’s see how the recovery is going based on industries we have data for in fairly real time.
The biggest takeaway is that even as the economy has started to reopen most of these industries has barely recovered.
Given these data, we can see it will be a long recovery for the economy.
One interesting way to look at the impact to the economy is through power consumption data.
Here is the data in 2020 for Lower 48 power in 2020 vs. the average of the prior 4 years. (Day of week adjusted.)
As you can see, power was tracking pretty similarly until late March. Then it dropped as compared to the prior average. Currently, power consumption is down about 10% year-over-year.
This suggests that demand for manufacturing are down along with other business activity that requires significant power.