Updating World counts and major cases through August 18, 2020 (ECDC timing):
First, top countries by case numbers (> 25,000 total cases) (color coding legend in the second part of the table):
Next, dynamics of new cases:
Hopefully, the gentle drop in the trend (14 days moving average) is going to be sustained from here on.
Federal fiscal position for July has been published (https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/files/reports-statements/mts/mts0720.pdf) and the numbers are interesting. Remember, this year, July was personal income tax filing month, as opposed to the usual April. So, over April and July 2020, total Federal receipts were at USD 805.350 billion, which is up on USD 786.893 billion in April and July 2019. Sounds good and it improved significantly monthly contribution to the annual deficit, with Federal deficit in July coming in at USD62.99 billion, or USD223.3 billion worse than April 2019 (which registered a surplus).
So here is where we stand:
Average cumulative per-term Federal deficit for Obama Administration was USD 3.523 trillion. The same for President Trump's tenure to-date (not yet a full term) is USD 5.078 trillion. Of this, USD 1.889 trillion. Hence, ex-COVID, President Trump's first term deficit currently is running at USD 3.190 trillion. There are still 3 months of the Federal Fiscal Year running and 5 months of the calendar year left. If we are to assume that Federal deficits in August-December were to remain on the levels of 2019 (stripping out effects of COVID19 pandemic), President Trump will end his last year in office with a cumulated per-term deficit of around USD 3.664 trillion, which is - and remember, this is excluding COVID19 effects - a higher deficit than accumulated, on average, across two terms of the Obama Administration.
Now, back to those charts above: COVID19 related increases in deficits have been staggering. So far, from April 1, through July, these amount to around USD1.89 trillion. Non-COVID deficits have been equally staggering.
Here is an interesting thing: while public health took out USD624 billion in 2020 from January through July, Pentagon took USD608 billion. Who is handling the pandemic in the U.S. is quite not as clear as who is spending the money like the proverbial drunken sailors.
Another interesting thing: net interest payouts by the Federal Government. These are defined as "Net interest consists of interest paid on Treasury securities and other interest that the government pays (for example, interest paid on late refunds issued by the Internal Revenue Service) minus the interest that it collects from various sources..." (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56073). Which means there are lags in Fed remitting interest payments, but much of that is already in the numbers. So far, the U.S. has managed to rake in USD 309 billion worth of net interest expenditures in the FY2020.
Yesterday, I gave a talk about the state of the global, European and Irish economies at the Omnipro event in Dublin. Here are my slides from that talk:
We tend to focus on shorter-term and sharper shocks than on longer-term trends, a sort of 'boiling a frog' conundrum in our behavioural biases. Hence, with the development of the current pandemic, we seem to have forgotten a simple fact of pre-COVID19 reality: things weren't going all too happily for the global economy in 2019 before the pandemic struck.
Here is a reminder: look at the economic policy uncertainty measures from the late 1990s through today
As it says in the chart comment box, economic uncertainty was running at elevated levels well before the pandemic struck.
Here is another way to see this point:
There is a 'problem', folks, even though there is no Houston to page about it. The legacy of the Global Financial Crisis did not dissipate when non-performing loans were finally (largely) wiped out from the banks balance sheets. Since the 'recovery' from the Great Recession, we have been living in a state of perpetual precariat all the way into the current pandemic shock. This state of precariat has been evident in the world data and the European data, so the problem is not 'demographic' or at least not that of ageing. May be it is generational?
Here is an interesting view on generational changes via Pew Research: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/essay/on-the-cusp-of-adulthood-and-facing-an-uncertain-future-what-we-know-about-gen-z-so-far/. As education levels rose across generations, state of insecurity rose as well. Quote; "There are already signs that the oldest Gen Zers have been particularly hard hit in the early weeks and months of the coronavirus crisis. In a March 2020 Pew Research Center survey, half of the oldest Gen Zers (ages 18 to 23) reported that they or someone in their household had lost a job or taken a cut in pay because of the outbreak. This was significantly higher than the shares of Millennials (40%), Gen Xers (36%) and Baby Boomers (25%) who said the same. In addition, an analysis of jobs data showed that young workers were particularly vulnerable to job loss before the coronavirus outbreak, as they were overrepresented in high-risk service sector industries." Note that GenZ has higher levels of educational attainment of any generation. And yet, they are more susceptible to labour market shocks.
The younger generations are also progressively more attuned to news flows and more anxious about key structural (non-COVID shock) problems we face.
Have the mid-2010s been a pivoting point toward the new Age of Anxiety? Did COVID19 pandemic exacerbate this onset of the new age? In the long run, these are more important questions than the coronavirus threat alone.
We are becoming numb to the sheer size of the public health disaster that is unfolding in the U.S. Numb, careless and utterly devoid of any concern for those around us. Here are the latest numbers:
See the dashed orange line in the chart below? That is the count of total COVID19-attributed deaths in the U.S.
Yes, it has been thus from July 12 on: the U.S. continues to pull away from Europe in terms of total deaths counts. Higher testing rates, or better health care system, or the American Way of Life are clearly not doing anything worth hanging on the wall as a point of pride: Americans are dying from the disease that the rest of the developed world has managed to contain (at least for now).
The #COVIDIOTS crowd is reproducing on social media various shades of logical garbage, along the line of 'My neighbour was reported to have died from COVID19, even though he was hit by a car" as some sort of a palatably consistent argument that coronavirus pandemic is just a 'Democrats Hoax' or a conspiracy of the 'doctors and the 1-percenters'. Yet, the reality is that even if you assume (do not do this at home) that some 25% of COVID19 attributed deaths are 'fake' or 'errors', you still get U.S. death rates from COVID19 in excess of those in thee EU27.
Facts:
COVID19 ESG impacts:
McKinsey have a neat summary of changes in economic outlook across major global regions:
A more granular perspective is from consensus forecasts, as summarized by the Focus Economics and by other sources:
The above are from my presentation deck from earlier today for a Dublin-based conference.
The key to all of the above is that we are still in a very complex, highly uncertain forecasting environment, and behavioural differences between professional forecasters, economic analysts and business practitioners are vast, reflecting on overall forecasts and outlook sentiments reported.
My seminar from last week for Euromoney is now available online here: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/3015960150760/WN_zHo5R5sNTMyKzm9xhxtIMA.
We talked less about MMT (currently, monetary policies already replicate some of the key features of the proposition) and more about longer-term problems with economic growth and monetary policies.
