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I don’t think anyone here will be surprised to read this that the US GDP has contracted by 32.9% in the second quarter, as we all know that this is the after effect of covid19, but what worries me is whether the US economy can actually bounce back this year, or even next year as Trump had claimed that the economy will definitely bounce back. Further in more worrying news the jobless claims has risen to 1.43 million people, and this figure doesn’t look good for the US economy in the long run. Lastly with Covid19 yet wrecking havoc on US economy what chances do you see of its recovery in light of these numbers?.

Sources:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-economy-gdp-latest-coronavirus-trump-pandemic-a9645881.html

https://www.wsj.com/articles/us-economy-gdp-report-second-quarter-coronavirus-11596061406

https://www.forbes.com/sites/simonconstable/2020/05/28/look-out-democrats-the-economy-is-looking-better-for--trump-than-you-think/#3f1516e839bc

Definitely not this year and not sure until the next one. We all knew US is a strong country. But trump words is merely a promise which can be true or not. I dont know but their economy has depleted fast and it will attribute to Trump's actions regarding covid19 scenario. He did a poor piss job to prevent it.

Maybe there is if the next President of US has a better solution. Their country is still one of the powerful in the world and only a great leader is needed to make it great again in spite of these worst scenario happening.

This virus will kill much more people due to economic impact, not medical

The US economy(and every other economy in the world) will bounce back only after the pandemic ends.
Unfortunately the pandemic is here to stay and I assume that it will end after most of the world population gets infected with coronavirus and survives that illness,so the pandemic might continue for 2-3 years.
The 32.9% decline looks scary,but the US economy was on steroids due to the massive money printing,so I assume that such rapid decline is kinda normal.The economic growth of the US from the previous years was more or less artificial.

It sounds aweful. but obviously it isn´t for some. Check out that profits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoR5sniTnv4

The situation and setup looks to me like another attempt to destroy the middle class and SMEs, pushing the distribution of wealth even more out of balance. Debt discharge and easy to get low interest loans will revive most bigger businesses in 2021, but the smaller ones will perish if they don´t adapt to the situation (if they can).

There are more things which gonna affect the US economy in the long run.

US is not handling the situation of covid19 in greater ways and it will lead to more chaos in terms of businesses and jobs. They have to handle their money flow that is spent on the security and military personnel of USA thus making it worst over the time since billions are actually spent over WAR rather than HEALTH industry.

According to the latest news, we will have vaccines for covid19 by December to January 2021 meanwhile making the US situation two to three fold worst! (over 6 months)

Once the vaccine is out US will have to spend lot of money to buy vaccines in the first place and have vaccination campaigns throughout the nation. It costs hell lot of money and I am afraid US will already have gotten into worst GDP that could be possible.

So definitely GDP isn't gonna recover this year for USA.

Trump's promises were merely political in my view and a bid to instill voter confidence as elections draw near. So much damage has already been done to businesses and as such there has to be a period of recovery where the market normalises (or the economy ceases to contract), after which, the nation can enter a period of economic expansion. Which is the phase the U.S has been in since the last recession.

The economic decline is the direct result of the effect of a pandemic, so trying to flatten the curve is one of the best routes to rebuilding the economy and not pumping more money into the market. Although this is needed to keep businesses afloat, but needs to be done in hand with slowing the spread of the virus and it also needs to be done holistically; injection funds into select businesses could create a greater gap between classes and further hurt the economy to the gain of a few.

That's one problem with this virus, its not going anywhere which will really make every country's economy crumble to pieces including US. And then there is a threat about China going full steam to thier economy which likely going to make them the strongest around. It would be easy for US to just keep printing while they still can than gonna be crushed.

Its economy is fueled by war but there ain't gonna be war goingto happen unless they can lure Iran to shoot first or probably China which can literally crush thier economy. They got to find another way to make thier economy alive again.

Atrocious numbers, worse than many analysts had anticipated. Yet it seems like the markets had already priced it in anyway. As soon as the news dropped, S&P 500 futures rallied ~2% over the next 8 hours.

It's becoming very typical now: terrible economic news keeps triggering rallies!

I guess that's how things work now that the Fed has proven they can just pump the markets to infinity. ::)

The best thing they could do is to discipline their citizens first since if everyone will follow the protocol for sure they will not suffer to much from huge economic recession, look at what happen on other countries they manage to handle covid-19 nicely and their lives came back to normal. Maybe they will learn a big lesson after this pandemic since in early days they are downplaying this and for this huge suffering they will surely know on what is the next actions for economic counteractions.

I have read many articles stated the same situation across countries, isn't it predictable?

Anyways, I'm still sure we will bounce back globally in about Q1 2021

The vaccine will be the main reason we will quickly bounce back to the "old" normal. It's already on phase three (for some brand)!

The analogy with the results for the second quarter of this year will give us inaccurate results. The global closure was a reason for the slowdown in global growth and many economic distortions.
The bounce will be rapid before the end of next year, but the economic distortions that took place need a lot of time to restore and make them before 2020.

If the number of cases in the US will continue to increase within the next months, I doubt that their economy will be able to recover within this year. However, the US can easily recover once this pandemic is done, but since the country is not showing any good sign in fighting the virus, it's like they will highly depend on the vaccine for the fast recovery of their economy.

But aside from the economic decline, I'm worried about the population if this virus will continue to spread. I mean, it's not a big percentage compare to the whole population, but the fact that already 100k+ of people died because of this in the US alone is a threat if it will last longer.

Year is nearly ending so its a though job for them to recover what they lost during this pandemic but its hard to think how deep they can go since even up till now they are been much affected by this pandemic and worse scenario on them is some of their people still under estimating the virus.

But we know the america is great so provably they will recover since they still ha e resources compares to the countries who are in 3rd world since for sure they will struggle to stand up after this covid ends.

The US economy is special in the sense that the dollar is not backed by commodities and foreign exchange reserves, and at the same time, the dollar is used as a currency throughout the world. Therefore, the United States can artificially improve its economy by uncontrolled printing of paper dollars. In the United States, they have long been living beyond their means and in fact in debt. However, by printing dollars, they can quickly rectify the situation.
It will be much more difficult for other countries to get out of the actually begun economic crisis.

If all will go well recovery should happen in 2022. It is totally impossible to recover this year. It is highly unlikely to see a recovery until end of next year. Yes some countries will recover already next year. Countries like China or some other fast growing smaller countries. USA and EU will recover in 2022. But only if all will go fine. If vaccine will be found fast and we will not fall into depression.

Whether next year or next quarter, the economy would continue to shrink or recover on a slowing rate that could longer for years except there is a sustainable way to manage the economy and countries get to do away with all of these proactive means of managing the crises. Vaccines development or drugs development that makes one immune to the virus that could fully open the economy is the only way out of this quagmire.

Or America can do the simple thing by raising the benchmark interest rate so that it pulls the dollar back to America and this will benefit America and will put pressure on many other countries in the world for experiencing deficits. America as a price maker can also increase the price of gold and increase its gold reserves so that similar cases of subprime mortgages do not happen again.

There is nothing to worry about for America because whatever happens America is still quite resilient and will always come out victorious because of its influence and hegemony as well as a matter of fact the current world system that designs is America, its vital keys are held by America. Many countries object, but what can they do, on the one hand, they need America and do not want to make America a bad boy.

There are two economies. There's the toytown markets where anything goes and anything is thrown at it to keep the party going. Then there's the real one where real people get boned every day.

The latter can continue to spiral downwards while the former is coaxed into remaining perky on the surface at least. Things like evictions haven't gotten started yet and there's a whole wave of business death yet to come too.

Nobody knows where this going to end but it's going to get worse and take longer than initially expected.

It must be noted that the actual decline is 9.5% from the previous quarter. The 32.9% number assumes that the 9.5% decline continues for an entire year.

granted, but it was still the worst economic contraction in history by far---since they started keeping records anyway.


i'm nervous to see what happens next. the beefed up unemployment payments are over. lots of moratoriums on evictions (including the one on federally subsidized housing) are ending. unemployment claims are on the rise again. this is all happening in the context of surging coronavirus outbreaks, which i expect to bring more economic slowdowns and retail closures.

it's upsetting to watch the stock markets pump at a time like this.

Why is it upsetting?

Would you be happier if the stock market went crashing down? Many people sold out earlier, and they are not quite happy with Bitcoin surging today. But plunging stocks would bring down cryptocurrencies too. Maybe, that's what you are looking for? But the market always fools us. We sell at the bottom and buy at the top. That's life, if I can say so

Why EU is not suffering like USA from this virus?

because it shows the stock market is completely disconnected from company fundamentals. it's obviously just a game of greater fools. the fed prints money, the markets pump, and you can always sell higher.

the risk has almost been completely removed from stock investment---or rather it's been socialized across society. when investors are effectively bailed out at every turn, asset prices (like housing) more or less permanently rise. this keeps the propertied/investor class entrenched, keeps the have-nots from attaining property, and punishes all savers by devaluing our currency, further compounding the problem.

in a true free market, people who make bad investments and buy into grossly over inflated markets would pay the price for their mistakes. we shouldn't be bailing these investors out. if we're tossing around bailouts, we might as well go full blown socialist---at least then there is some commendable goal ("to each according to his needs"), as opposed to just kowtowing to the investor class and making sure they never lose money.

Okay, let me rephrase my point

Would you be happy if Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies went straight downhill? But it is essentially the same money. I mean the money that gets pumped into the stock market somehow makes its way into cryptocurrencies too. It seems that the link has been firmly established by now, and Bitcoin has become part of the bigger game. Figuratively speaking, you can take Bitcoin prices out of the stock market, but you can't take stock market prices out of Bitcoin anymore. The stock market price dynamic gets mirrored in Bitcoin's prices

Maybe because the EU doesn't have Trump?

Joking aside, but I remember well when Trump claimed that COVID-19 was something like the common flu that would disappear with the arrival of spring. At that time, there were less than 20 confirmed infected people in the USA, but the fact is that no mass tests were conducted. Ignoring the problem and the stubborn policy of "No one can do anything to us" with the mass protests that took place due to the pandemic led to the virus spreading to the point where it can no longer be controlled.

The economic side of the story is quite clear, everyone, including the USA, pays the lockdown tax, and it should be added that the USA is in a trade war with China and that things are not going well when it comes to Russia. Taking into account all the other countries on their blacklist, it turns out that they have bad relations with half the world - while the other half cooperates with them out of fear.

But as someone has said before, there is no need to worry about the USA, they will get out of the crisis one way or another.

I would tend to trust more a currency that is more related to the "real-world" economy. Bitcoin going down would show that there is less manipulation and no "big players" controlling the currency rates (unlike the USD for instance).

It is? If you add up deaths from only Spain Italy France and the UK the death figure is close. There's a lot less political noise though.

The economic recovery of the countries that are seriously affected by this pandemic like US is still no assurance to make happen this year because currently the country is still struggling to control the cases they have which still makes them at the top most of all the countries in the world having the most number of infected cases. With that, the country will need enough time to recover even if the vaccine will soon to be available, a big country like US will need to undergo certain adjustments before they can totally bounce back from the economic crisis and declination they are currently experiencing right now.

There is no doubt that US can bounce back for we all know that US is a big and rich country, surely it will bounce back but I doubt that it can make happen this year because they are strongly affected by the pandemic so it will take maybe almost a year to fully recover which will accumulated to last up to next year. All countries are capable of bouncing back not just US. It is just that it would take time depending on the approach that the government will exert to make recovery happen. It would vary on time but surely countries will recover its economic status right after passing through this pandemic.

it does, i'm sure.

i would be happier with an actual free market---free of government interference; everyone stands on their own two feet. let the chips fall where they may. i don't need the fed to pump bitcoin, either.

the selective bailouts just exasperate the economic divisions in society. by perpetually giving handouts and subsidies to corporations and people who aren't poor and refusing to ever let the markets organically crash, they are destroying all notions of upward mobility and meritocracy. at the risk of sounding like a pinko commie, this is all pretty clearly designed to entrench existing capital and property owners at the expense of everyone else.

That news was already not a surprising one for we all know that all countries are affected by the pandemic which tracked down to have a direct effect on the economic state of the country. We must expect that because of the pandemic, even the richest and biggest countries will suffer just like US that even it have a large land mass, it do also have a big population to be supported by the government. Surely the economic declination have been a result of the couple of months lockdown which brought business establishments to close down for a while to follow the preventive measures just to somehow be able to control the inflation rate of the infected cases that the US have. As of the moment, they still remain on the top that is why it is not a surprise that their economy is suffering right now.

There is no doubt that US can do bounce back after this crisis. It is just in need for the vaccine to be discovered to end this pandemic so that people can get back to work and all businesses and economic related works will start operating to be able for the economy to recover. This might not happen this year for the vaccine is still not available because those that have recently been discovered are still under testing. With the effect of the pandemic into the citizens and the economy of US, for sure it would take time for them to be able to fully recover. But rest assured, they will bounce back from scratch.

So, what will be year drop? 50%? How gov could allow so stupid isolation?

EU is also suffering but has completely different approach to the pandemic. EU reacted very early and US was denying that something is actually happening. Alsow, EU started recovery programme for its economy and it's trying to support its member.states ro get out of pandemic and economic crysis. And what are US government and Trump doing? I think you know the master

Agreed. Most of the EU nations seems to have recovered from the pandemic. For example, each of the EU countries which were hit most severely (such as the UK, France, Italy and Spain) used to witness as much as 1,000 deaths per day. Now this figure is down to single digits. That is a 99% reduction (an exception would be the UK, where the reduction is only around 90%). On the other hand, in the United States the daily death toll is still hovering around 1,000-1,500.

I don't really think we can say that Bitcoin has more to do with the "real-world" economy than fiat (USD)

Seriously, how many goods and services can you buy with it? Not many. Bitcoin is mostly locked in its speculative bubble (okay, market), and if you think there's less manipulation going on, then think again. It is small, and, consequently, there's a lot more room for abuse by powerful entities (aka whales). It can't even be a point of serious discussion as a simple look at USDX versus Bitcoin price dynamic says all there's to say

The disturbing thing is, it's not just banks and mortgage servicers getting bailouts, GM and Chrysler got bailouts from the Fed too, and never even payed them back.

According to this (https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/list), GM has $11,308,238,095 outstanding in bailouts, Chrysler has $1,212,849,005 outstanding. And you wonder why auto companies need government bailouts as they don't have anything to do with finance.

It is not going to get any better any time soon. Trump has taken all of USA hostage nowadays and he is going "either my way or highway" which is going to either result with him getting 4 more years and you will see the country get better since he will allow it, or Biden will win and he will just fix it and make things better anyway, so after the elections in either way the country will get better, long term I would pick Biden but short term I feel like next summer we are going to have 1-2 deaths max per day in all the nation no matter who wins.

Economy obviously gets a hit from this, we are talking about record breaking unemployment rates and that is why I feel like there is a situation where it requires time no matter how you fix it, and with time we are going to see economy recovering but also a lot more people in poverty as well.

It is true that the EU has recovered quite a bit since the pandemic hit the world, but their economies are in tatters in most places. Majority of the countries like Italy, Spain etc were already facing economic issues even before the pandemic struck them.

It will probably take many years for their economies to fully recover. On the other hand, countries like Australia and New Zealand are doing a spectacular job in comparison based on what I heard.

I don't think it is possible in the way you mean it

And I'm not sure either that you would be honestly happier with a genuinely free, anarchic market. Without government oversight (interference, as you call it), we would see an endless stream of scams like Mt. Gox, Cryptsy, BTC-e, to name but just a few. Put simply, it will be very far from "everyone standing on their own two feet". Rather, everyone and his little bro will be on their knees. You can't seriously hope to let the chips fall where they may. There will surely be someone who will take pains to make them fall in their favor


Meritocracy is over-hyped. You will still have to rely on the opinions of other people when gauging someone's merits. In fact, I'm not in the least surprised to see the term actively used as a handy euphemism for nepotism

Italy and Spain were facing issues for quite some time. They are being kept afloat by Germany. Essentially after the departure of the United Kingdom, the EU has become a family business run by Angela Merkel. German fund inflows are keeping the other members alive. But in the long term, this is not going to be beneficial for countries such as Italy. Australia/New Zealand had a strong economy even before the pandemic. And with the mining industry in good condition, Australia has nothing to worry.

If you do think that whatever claims are made by Trump is really going to play out , I do think you might be horribly wrong. Unfortunately there is one thing we have to understand:

US Printed more money in a month as compared to two centuries

Plus now they are arranging for another stimulus bill. I do think this is a way to make sure people stay quiet when they see their economy declining.

GDP was supposed to decline , people don't have jobs , without jobs the whole system will shut down sooner or later BUT !

Good news is that more jobs are opening up and people are getting back on the track

But , I do think it will take a lot of time.
Then there comes the vaccination , whichever country makes the vaccination first wins the battle.

_*_

I do think right now India and UK have a tough battle going on with the vaccination thing.

I don't see US picking up anytime soon.
For the time being expect another 2 years for the economic situation to be good enough .

you're just advocating for a nanny state. i'm quite capable of minimizing my exposure to risky third parties and scams, thank you very much.

if you haven't figured it out by now, regulations are always crafted and enforced in a way that consolidates industry for the big players and reduces competition. as a consumer, and a savvy one at that, i surely come out the loser as a result.


what's a better alternative?


meritocracy is basically the exact opposite of nepotism.....

You can't be all-around savvy. Put shortly, there is always a place for a nanny state in your heart (whether you like it or not)


It is not that meritocracy is bad. The problem with it is that you can't implement it in practice. To do that, you would need an external power (God) that would be able to judge everyone impartially and enforce its judgement upon everyone else. In other words, it is a fantasy, a figment of your ass


That's why it makes such a nice euphemism. You know, war is peace, freedom is slavery, etc

not the point.

the value i lose as a consumer from nanny state regulation outweighs the value i gain from being "protected" from third party risk. i resent losing value because other people are too stupid and careless to gauge risk. caveat emptor.


if you're saying we're stuck with nepotism, fine. if you're saying that's the ideal we should strive for, i disagree.

You actually don't know that, caveat emptor or otherwise

There are things which you take as granted, even the very fact that you can be a buyer and considered such (more specifically, as possessing a certain set of rights), but you might not see that it is made possible because of the nanny state somewhere down the line. In other words, you only see the tip of the iceberg and arrive at an erroneous conclusion that you lose more with a nanny state than without. Without, you wouldn't even be a consumer in the first place


I just point out that meritocracy is only, well, a dream. And a dangerous dream at that, in the sense of idealistically trying to achieve it and realistically achieving probably the worst form of nepotism instead, thoroughly disguised as meritocracy (arguably the worst part of it)

Because we did it far worse than the US, Belgium, UK, Italy, Spain have a higher death rate per 1k/population than the US.
If we count based on cases, the EU is even worse
US has 4,862,513 cases with 158,968 deaths.
EU has ~3 million with 190 000 deaths.

The difference comes from the way the economy was affected during the lockdown, the US is more consumption inclined than Germany for example, and thus the effect was immediate and far more serious, for the economies than rely on exports and manufacturing the toll is yet to come in full force and a 10% GDP drop is not anything to brag about it. Italy dropped 12.4%, Germany 10.5 %and Spain 18.5%, yet both Italy and Spain were affected almost the same in terms of deaths and cases while Germany went almost unscratched but it still suffered.
And while Japan is almost a model of combating the virus they went also down by 26.3%.

We will have to wait till 2021 to see all the effects of the lockdowns.


The mining industry needs consumers to buy the products made from what you mine if the economies of the other go down there will be a slump in demand and Australia will join the fate of OPEC countries. Just because you make stuff it doesn't mean you will also be able to sell it at a profit.

It's difficult to determine objective truth in both number of cases of CV19 and number of deaths from CV19. Most countries I suspect are trying very hard to ensure they look as good as possible when compared against other countries, and will be adjusting their figures through careful control of who they test and when they test them. And it depends on your metric of comparison, too. 'Number of cases' is hugely variable depending on the extent of testing, and whether it's blanket testing or just people with symptoms. As for 'deaths from CV19' - you can well imagine countries trying very hard to ascribe other reason for death where possible.
Perhaps the best commonly-used figure we can use is excess mortality against the 5 year average, on the basis that whilst governments find it fairly easy to control official 'reason' for death, they find it much more difficult to hide the fact of the death itself.

If I remember correctly this crisis has erased the progress made by the US economy of the last 5 years so it is not realistic to expect that everything will be recovered during this or next year, the effects of the pandemic will be felt for years and the worst thing is that this is not over it is possible that the behaviour of people will change and their spending habits change with them and in an economy so dependent on the consumer this could spell doom for many industries during the short and long term.

Well every country that has an active case of covid is trying their very hard to eliminate the virus, to dissolve and to find a vaccine on it, all of us are trying all of medical personnel are doing their job 100% in every sector and comparison these days are unnecessary. We are all hit with this, we should be coordinating to everyone besides the number of covid cases aren't final I'm sure there are people who has the symptoms but is just neglecting to visit a doctor coz they know that hospitals during this time is full of patient. We can't just be announcing anything if we are not testing everyone, who could have known that Europe has a higher cases than US only because not every one is put on the tests.


This is what I'm talking about, so we can't expect that the number of cases is going down or slow down, the more people we tests the more we are going to get results and most likely most of us are just asymptomatic one, which I think is not belong or counted as a active case.

Indeed. If governments were interested primarily in the welfare of all of their citizens, then the world would be a very different place. Imagine if all data reported was unbiased truth, and not manipulated or carefully selected.  If everyone was working together, and scrupulously honest, then China would have alerted the world as soon as the first cases started arising in humans... and the rest of the world, instead of staying open and gambling with their people's health in order to not suffer some short-term economic damage, instead decided to quarantine all new entrants... the virus would never have spread.

But we are where we are. Perhaps lessons will be learned and countries will start acting with a bit more maturity from now on. Or perhaps not. At the least, we can hope that certain safeguards will be put in place to stop the same sort of thing happening again, the next time some deadly virus passes to humans.

Both the bold text and the not bold texts have different meaning.
For sure their economy will not recover this year since their Fed Chairman said already in an interview that it will take time for their economy to be back on its track. On the other hand, yes Trump has claimed that their economy will bounce back and yes it will like most of the economies but it will take time for it to happen.

With the trend of the cases in US showing no signs of a reversal, its expected that unemployed people there are slowly rising even though there are some establishments that have re-opened. There are still some establishments who are closed permanently or temporarily.

The only chance that I'm seeing and all of us are seeing right now are a vaccine/cure. This is the only hope that I'm seeing right now in order for this virus to be controlled.

That's why I compared western countries and not countries that are known for their propaganda or countries which have no resources to even find out the impact of the disease. For example RSA and Egypt are leading the pack in Africa with over 150 deaths/mil in case of South Africa, but that's because they have the means to test and identify, How could a country next to it like Botswana have a death rate of 0.8, 200 times lower?

The western part of EU and the US are near matches, both in cases of testing per million, they have the financial resources, it's pretty hard to cover-up deaths that's why you can compare them, once you chose countries at random like Angola and Mongolia it's pretty obvious there are way too many variables to make it an effective comparison.


https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking-covid-19-excess-deaths-across-countries
You can see that the excess reflects a bit the static on deaths, the US is a bit better than France Italy, or Spain but worse than Germany or Denmark.

But the number of deaths will not reflect equally in the economy, and this is why the US although might get out of this far better in terms of victims will end up worse short term economically. Long term I expect the EU to suffer a longer period.


Not really, there are a few exceptions, one example is Turkmenistan where because of their all mighty and powerful and corrupt leader there is no case!  ;D
And there are lot more where wannabe dictators are not doing anything because if you don't test you don't have people suffering or dying from it and it means you're a brilliant leader!

Just be weary n the third and fourth quarter when the economy posts the largest quarterly GDP increase in recorded history.  I imagine such a headline would get considerable touting by the current administration despite the fact that it will completely lack all the context of how bad things were and still are.  There will be no quick recovery from this, and it will take years to get back to where we were economically before the pandemic hit, assuming we can even get back there at all.

WOW.  32.9% is no joke, and that's scary to me. 

What I'm hoping is that these numbers temporarily reflect the consequence of the COVID-19 shutdown and that the contraction eases in the upcoming quarters as people start getting back to work.  I also do think that's going to be the case, because I'm seeing my local stores and restaurants reopening--the odd thing is that I'm not seeing a lot of people around in the stores and such.  I'm assuming that might be because people are getting stuff delivered from Amazon and the like. 

So that's the US.  I'm curious as to how the rest of the world is faring in terms of their economies. 

That's true, although I haven't seen many in my area that have closed up shop for good.  But keep in mind that I don't own a car and I generally don't travel too far from home.

There is one serious advantage the US has against the more socialistically-inclined countries - it does this boom-bust cycle every 10 years, give or take. The economy is fairly well-equipped to take a hit and recover. I'm not a big fan of the government meddling in the economy like they did back in 2008 and are trying to do now, but in the grand scheme of things the recovery will be lead by people who know they have to go and take care of their own shit instead of waiting for a handout. The US has no lack of such people. Can't say that about many other countries.

That depends on them not dying of course, which is the one thing the government should be meddling in but it isn't. Go figure...

It is difficult to predict, as obviously the economic effects of an event can be felt long afterwards. We also have to consider whether there might be any partial or localised lockdowns in the future as the number of new cases remains high. Also, easing of lockdown and people returning to work might just mean that the damage stops getting worse. In the US this is complicated by the upcoming election. You might imagine that Trump will do anything he can to prop up the economy and make it look good in the short-term, with the longer-term effects of this only being felt after the election.

Same here in the UK. Lockdown is over, but city centres and out-of-town retail parks are still extremely quiet. Some businesses remain temporarily closed, some have closed permanently. People are allowed to go out, but aren't. The government is giving people 50% off prices for eating out on certain days - but the restaurants still look fairly empty. People know that the virus is still out there. The economy here will not recover any time soon.

Yes, I suspect that as everywhere else, there has been a surge in online orders. But this works disproportionately in favour of Amazon etc.; bricks-and-mortar businesses still suffer. And this effect is amplified by the fact that office workers are still working from home. Businesses that rely on city centre foot traffic will find it difficult to survive.

Finally, each day brings new newspaper headlines of some big multinational company shedding huge numbers of jobs. Partly from necessity, no doubt, but also I'd imagine to an extent many are using CV19 as an excuse to make huge 'efficiency' savings to reduce headcount for the benefit of shareholders.

Crisis always accelerates change, and this is a major crisis. Working patterns and online retail may have changed forever.

The 32.9% drop is actually the annualized rate.  The drop was only 9.5% year over year, and was extrapolated to get the annualized rate, which really doesn't make sense and is a bit of reckless reporting considering the strict shutdown conditions that existed in the second quarter will not exist for the full year and so we are not going to see a full 33% drop in annual GDP.  But the bigger number gets more clicks.  The silver lining is that things aren't actually as bad as was reported.

Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/07/30/896714437/3-months-of-hell-u-s-economys-worst-quarter-ever

Maybe because everyone is flocking to Dorset? From a few images I saw in the news seems like a bigger crowd than at the landing of Cnut the Great   ;D ;D
But yeah, I think there should be a sizeable decline everywhere, and the bigger and livelier the city the worse the decline, I would say that we're at about 80% overall activity in city center, but here in CE, we have managed to get away with fewer cases and victims that the western part of the continent.


I expect the office/business rental to take a solid hit in the next period and then all that depends on it, coffee places and restaurants that fought so hard for a place near those will be the second wave of victims, that if they somehow managed to survive till now.
If this goes on for another year there will also be shifts in rent in house pricings, and god knows what those will trigger for some cities. A revival of the rural areas? Would be interesting.


News have become a serious business, you have to put more emphasis on marketing than selling actual products and nothing gets more views and rating that big numbers, just wait for the next quarter and they will forget how they reported this decline and switch to another model that would produce some clickbaitish results. A 9.5% decline is on par with Germany if I remember correctly their numbers, and even better than Italy Spain, which enforces my view, some countries in the EU will be hit worse longterm.

In his statement before, "Make America Great Again", I really don't see improvements and equality in his term, even right now. All of his words are not put into actions, so I don't expect for the economy of US to suddenly bounce back after this pandemic ends. It is not that easy to recover from an economic crisis if the leader is not that responsible enough about its duties. Also the mindset of the President is really a must, he should know how to prioritize things so that economic recovery will not be delayed.


Most of the running Presidents in US do not look responsible enough for me. But what can we do if we didn't give them a chance to prove their duty in their territory. Overall, US is a good country and a well-developed country.

I don't think so that they can make large movements quickly because right now they are still suffering from the pandemic outbreak and we all know that they are one of the most populated countries. Today there are a lot of people lost their job because some of the companies and business don't want to operate and they want to avoid getting spreading of this virus immediately even this is a good thing but still one of the problem how does the economy brings back to normal if the virus is still spreading we need to wait for the COVID vaccine or resume all of the things to we can go back to normal and risk a large number of people that can possibly get infected.

that's the annualized rate. the quarter over quarter drop was a slightly less scary 9.5%.


where i live, all the bars are closed again, and no more dining in at restaurants. a couple local businesses have closed for good.

july unemployment numbers get published later today. i'm eager to see whether the june recovery was a fluke or not. my feeling is it's gonna be a long and painfully slow recovery to get back to pre-pandemic employment levels.

the expansion of amazon and other e-commerce and delivery companies also has major implications for the shape of the economy. going forward, we should see less full-time workers with benefits and more gig workers and part-time workers.

I still can't believe people are thinking that just because stock markets soared and the likes of JP Morgan and Chase and so forth made profit the economy is back on track. We are talking about 33% drop in GDP, do you know how bad that is? Let me put it in this perspective, the GDP fall in the great depression of 1929 where people had trouble finding food to eat was around 15% and the 2008 drop in GDP was a bit over 1%, we are talking about 33% right now, it is record breaking and there has never been anything similar to this in US history before.

Yet somehow people are acting like everything will be alright when the government is printing trillions of dollars to stop the bleeding and paying citizens money for doing nothing just so the economy could stand on its feet once again. Things are going awful!

Because as people have said before it's not really 33% but more like 10% and because this is not the same as the previous crises in history, this is not a shutdown of the economy because businesses go bankrupt but self-inflicted with forced closures.

Trouble finding food?
With people habits changing we have excess productions in some areas and excess food:
https://www.dw.com/en/covid-19-crisis-belgians-called-upon-to-eat-more-fries/av-53310312
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2020-05-21/covid-19-poses-an-unprecedented-crisis-for-potato-farmers

People are staying at home, buying and cooking for themselves, since the easy option fo going out is out of the picture they are wasting and throwing out far less food and so a lot remains in the shops and deposits, ironically ...turning nevertheless to waste (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/covid-19-food-waste-mountains-environment/).
The difference is that no longer people who buy it throw it out is directly the producers. Once the chains start diverting their production where it matters we will even see a drop in food price.


Well, the GDP is down for the 3 previous months, the effects have already been felt in the economy yet, does it resemble the 1929 crisis? No! And it will not be like that.
Wait for the 3rd quarter, you will suddenly see that things are not looking as scary as they seem now.

It's coming back, some sectors are bouncing back, some will take more time. Some industries are hit hard; like Bars, Nightclubs, Movie theaters, etc...they can not make up the lost revenue.

Look at the markets, tech is booming.

Will we pay for all the money printing down the road...some economist say YES, other say NO; so who knows...

aren't we paying for it now? CPI doesn't tell the whole story. in fact, that's one of the whole scams behind the dominant economic metrics used today. they focus on things like day-to-day consumer consumption. CPI tells us the cost of food, clothes, medical care, things like that. it doesn't tell us what's happening in markets with elastic supply and demand and it doesn't tell us anything about investments.

just look at the price of gold or bitcoin---they're becoming increasingly unaffordable. just imagine what happens when bitcoin breaks above the 2017 high. ;)

economists only care about achieving stable CPI inflation. they don't care that over time, you or i can afford less and less of assets capable of storing any value.

we need to switch to a more holistic approach to measuring the effects of inflation---one that takes into account rising/falling prices across all markets. i doubt that will happen because mainstream economists, heads of industry, and governments all have a strong interest in downplaying how virtually all economic growth today is being siphoned into the financial markets, leaving the working class (who don't have exposure to the markets through retirement accounts and property ownership) increasingly poor relative to real asset values.

the whole system is set up as a land grab.

USA was hit big because they have the biggest cases, the major contributory factor is the covid-19, there's none other things to be blame here.
However, it's not only the USA who got hit and into recession already, some countries also struggle as well especially my beloved country the Philippines.

Per report found here ; https://think.ing.com/snaps/philippines-economy-crashes-into-recession-2q-gdp-at-16.5/


Until there's no vaccine for covid-19, we can expect the worst, sorry but it is the reality.