The new Quinnipiac Poll, released Wednesday, finds that – for the first time this year – more people disapprove than approve of the way President Trump is handling the economy. Before the pandemic racked the economy, President Trump had expected the economy would be the basis of his re-election campaign – as he took credit […]

Many older Americans reacted to the financial crisis of 2008 by deciding not to retire. Some who had retired went back to work if they could do so. And that trend continued for the next decade. Now the question is whether that trend is over – another victim of the pandemic. The proportion of people […]

Seasonal adjustment is one of the more obscure potential casualties of the pandemic recession. A well known problem with seasonal adjustment is that an outlier observation will lead the seasonal adjustment process to shift its belief about what is normal for that month. In cases like the coronavirus recession, this is undesirable because the unusual […]

The United States may be on the verge of an unfortunate accomplishment rarely reached in the last century: a presidential four-year term in which real per capita GDP was lower when the term ended than when it began. The International Monetary Fund estimated this week that the real gross domestic product (GDP) of the United […]

The private sector added jobs in May almost everywhere in the United States. The public sector lost jobs, also almost everywhere. Those two trends seem likely to persist in the months to come, as states continue to allow more businesses to reopen – and as state and local governments see tax revenues remain at depressed […]

The 538 webpage, part of ABC news and originally set up by Nate Silver, has just done a survey of academic macroeconomic forecasters about the coronavirus recession. Allan Timmermann at UC San Diego and I helped them with this and the results were released this afternoon. The results point to a deep recession with a […]