On: U.S. Economy Shrinks at 4.8% Pace, Signaling Start...

[londons_explore]

Thats 4.8% annualized. The real figure is 1.17% for 3 months.

It's quite impressively small really, considering everyone is sitting at home, and many aren't working at all.

[drdec → londons_explore]

Not when you factor in that shutdowns didn't really start until the very end of the quarter. According to Wikipedia[1], earliest state stay-at-home order was March 19 in California and 19 states either waited until April or never issued a stay-at-home order.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_and_local_governmen...

[meragrin_ → drdec]

It wasn't just large government shutdowns. It was local governments taking action, people traveling less, businesses cancelling/denying trips, people eating out less, etc. All of that started weeks before the large scale shutdowns.

[thehappypm → londons_explore]

Let's assume that 2 weeks of Q1 were significantly impacted. Let's make the very poor assumption that it scales linearly. That would imply that in Q2, we'll have about a -7% GDP, -28% annualized.

[harryh → londons_explore]

Keep in mind that this is a Q1 total and the bulk of Q1 was unaffected by coronavirus.

[creaghpatr → londons_explore]

Skews towards the end of the quarter, probably. Much steeper drop in Q2 coming.

[ceejayoz → londons_explore]

That's a weird way of doing the numbers.

If I get murdered in December, it's not super helpful to note that I was 92% alive on average that year.

[ramblerman → ceejayoz]

Sometimes analogies are clever in that they simplify a concept, I'm not sure you got there.

you are either dead or alive. Economic growth is a percentage.

[ceejayoz → ramblerman]

The economy kinda died at the end of the quarter. Averaging in Jan/Feb's numbers don't reflect that well.