economy

Retail Sales Collapse

This morning retail sales were announced for March. They were down a record 6.2% in one month. As you can see clearly from this graph, this was the biggest drop on record.

Retail Sales from 1992 to 2020

The largest drop in one month in the financial crisis recession was only around 4%.

Even though this is a larger drop than any month in 08-09, it will probably be closer to -20% to -30% in April. Stores were only closed about 1/3 of the month of March.

As I mentioned in my economic updates, this recession will be far deeper than any recession since the Great Depression and will take a long time to recover from.

By Christopher Schwarz, ago

COVID-19 Modeling Update

As I have posted for weeks, my baseline model is that the US will follow Italy’s model. We are still a long way from being to reopen based on the current criteria of governors.

As you can see through yesterday, the comparison matches.

We are running about two weeks behind Italy when it comes to the peak. Presuming we follow Italy’s path, we will still be at a high level of cases in two weeks.

Another example if if we compare to the EU overall. If you think about Italy as say a NY and the rest of the countries as States, that could be a good comparison. If we match peaks, here is the EU. (France had a weird day so I cut that off.)

We are about 9 days behind the EU. Please note that big drop at the end looks impressive, but that gets them to 61% of cases at peak, 18 days after it happened. Italy only took 9 days to have that same drop and of course Italy is still at 61% of cases.

By Christopher Schwarz, ago