U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) in Q3 2020 increased by about one-third after falling to about the same degree in Q2, but it is still 5% under what it would have been without the onset of the coronavirus crisis.
There are two jobs numbers that will tell us when the economy has returned to nearly robust health:
- Versus the huge drop in employment between February and April, the number of jobs recovered to date has yielded a decent claw-back ratio (50%), but it needs to rise a lot higher. Not until the jobs-recovery ratio approaches 90% will there be strong confidence that the economy is firmly back on track.
