WASHINGTON: Fresh signs the U.S. economic recovery may be faltering surfaced over the last week with high-frequency measures of retail traffic and jobs both ebbing amid a record-breaking surge in coronavirus cases.
Millions of formerly employed Americans remain sidelined by the recession triggered by the virus, and uncertainty over the future direction of the country – politically and economically – remains especially high in the shadow of this week’s still-unsettled U.S. presidential election.
Foot traffic to retail locations turned lower, according to data collected by Unacast and Safegraph and indexed to March 1, before a state of emergency was declared to combat the pandemic. The firms’ information is based on cellphone movements matched against a library of identified retail locations.
Estimates of seated diners at restaurants collected by reservation site OpenTable fell for a third straight week.
The number of people working declined for a second straight week at a sample of around 55,000 small businesses whose employee time is managed by Homebase joinhomebase.com/data.
The firm has been providing data on that set of businesses, all of which were open at the start of the year, to see how they fared through the pandemic. The number of them now open has fallen for six weeks in a row, from a post-pandemic high of 45,347 in mid-September to 44,403.
Employment at a broader set of industries, maintained by UKG, has been sluggish, growing at less than 1% through October, virtually flat for the smallest businesses, and falling over the past week.
An index of job openings maintained by the Indeed www.hiringlab.org Hiring Lab was relatively flat through October, at around 15% below the levels of a year ago. Estimates from analytics firm Chmura www.chmuraecon.com/blog, comparing new job openings to predicted levels without the pandemic, showed a deeper gap of more than 20%. – Agencies
