Excargodog

721,060

The term “stalled” seems to come to mind...

LoneStar32

"New reality" is the term I come up with. These are the numbers we are stuck with until this COVID thing starts to go away.

bradthepilot

Maybe, maybe not. Could be short term stall for growth due to hurricanes (see above). Will know in another week one way or the other.

LoneStar32

I think a lot of people are going to be disappointed

tallpilot

Pollyannas trying to blame the stall on hurricanes.

Correlation is not causation but in this case the proximate cause is the evaporation of government stimulus and attendant lack of spending. As mentioned this is the new baseline until the economy improves or gets another amphetamine injection from the government or the central bank.

Excargodog

Short term fires and hurricanes and longer term economic factors are not mutually exclusive. Clearly, the way the government at all levels have reacted to COVID has been uniquely devastating to the GDP. Even so, our European brethren are starting to reopen their economy (and their public schools) even in the face of the resumption of a higher number of cases.

exactly how the mission morphed from ‘flatten the curve’ to ‘shut down until we get a vaccine,’ I’m not sure. I do know that the fastest a vaccine has ever been developed and approved prior to this is a little over four years and that was for Ebola which has a case-fatality rate of about 66%. And even then there was violent resistance to taking the vaccine from those most at risk:

https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/11/1052421

So it isn’t as if the battle is won even if we do get a good vaccine. Getting the vaccination levels up is not going to be that easy.

So yeah, we’ve probably triggered a pretty bad recession, maybe even a depression, and it might be a long one.

bradthepilot

I think I offered a reasonable hypothesis and also provided some data and actual analysis that supported (though not conclusively) it. I even stated that we'll know more in a week when we have a week without hurricane interference to compare against.

You call names and throw out guesses without any real supporting analysis, then assert them as fact? The truth is nobody knows for sure, but only one of us is truly clueless.

bradthepilot

True enough. With respect to the hurricane scenario, I was responding to the notion that the recent couple of days of TSA data has been less than expectations. That aside, I agree that there is nothing in any data (TSA or otherwise) that would suggest we'll be back to the average 2.5m/day counts in the near future.

pangolin

Watch the drift.

Excargodog

Good call...