|
|
Earlier this year, economists’ vision for September 2021 was bright: the vast majority of people would be vaccinated, schools would fully reopen across the country, and retail, travel, and face-to-face service businesses would bloom again… and the work-at-home millions would be commuting back to their offices.
Now, thanks to the media fear of COVID’s Delta variant and politicians’ demonic COVID War mandates, schools are uncertain about how, or even whether, to bring students back. Corporations are pushing back employees’ return to the office into next year (see related articles). Retailers are requiring masks again, travelers are pausing their plans, and events that had been rescheduled are postponed yet again.
The omens are dark. Consumer sentiment has plummeted to its lowest point in a decade, according to a 27 August University of Michigan survey.
Instead of adding about a million jobs as it did in each of June and July, in August the economy tacked on a meager 235,000 (see related story).
In mid-July, the number of tourists visiting Hawaii reached 90 percent of pre-COVID volumes; six weeks later, the state’s governor told potential visitors not to come.
Over the same period, attendance at movie theaters plunged from near-2019 levels to about half that.
A shortage of building materials has hobbled the construction industry and a scarcity of computer chips has shuttered auto plants from Detroit to Italy to Shanghai.
In late June, Oxford Economics had forecast 7.5-percent growth for the U.S. economy this year; in late August, it whittled the number to 6 percent.
Goldman Sachs had pegged this year’s expansion at 6 percent but has now cut the number to 5.7 percent. However, it also bumped up its 2022 outlook from 4.6-percent growth to 4.7.
“Nothing is worse than dashed hope,” chief economist Constance Hunter at KPMG said to the WSJ.
“You thought, ‘My kids are back in school, I can go back to work.’ But now that’s very much in question,” she added.
TRENDPOST: In August, at least 1.5 million Americans refused to look for work out of fear of the Delta virus, the U.S. labor department reported. Despite the demand for workers in many business sectors, the U.S. economy is still 5.3 million jobs short of the number it supported in February 2020.
Thus, until the workforce picks up, economies will stay down. It is simple math: the less people working, the less money they spend. The more they earn, the more they spend.
And today, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that the number of people employed with full-time jobs plunged by 13.7 million last year… registering the sharpest decline in this data since 1967, when the agency began tracking this data.
Making matters worse, and again, an inflation reality, while prices keep rising, median household income decreased 2.9 percent to $67,500 between 2019 and 2020, the Census Bureau reported.
.