The Philadelphia Fed released the coincident index for June today. Wisconsin has re-attained economic activity levels recorded at the NBER peak of February 2020.
Figure 1: Wisconsin coincident index (black), nonfarm payroll employment (teal), civilian employment (red). NBER defined recession dates shaded gray. Source: Philadelphia Fed, BLS, NBER, and author’s calculations.
Wisconsin’s coincident index is 0.12% above prior peak, while the US as a whole is down 2.53%. As noted in this post, employment (one of the inputs into the coincident index) is roughly matching the Wisconsin DoR’s forecast.
The Wisconsin index relative position versus other states is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Philadelphia Fed June coincident index relative to 2020M02, in %. Darker indicates larger positive numbers. Source: Philadelphia Fed and author’s calculations.
Given the spread of the delta variant in the relatively low-vaccination-rate states of the South, it will be of interest to see if there is a growth impact in July/August. The Baumeister et al. weekly index (through July 10) has not shown a big negative growth rate yet in states such as Missouri and Arkansas. (See WaPo for assessment of trends.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/opinion/new-york-real-estate.html
June 25, 2021
What New York could learn from Utica
By Paul Krugman
Last week I took advantage of the fading pandemic to take a bike tour in the Finger Lakes region, making a detour on the way to visit the old industrial city of Utica, N.Y. — which is where I lived until I was 8 years old. I found the street we used to live on, although to be honest I couldn’t remember which house was ours. But perhaps that’s not all that surprising: The neighborhood has changed since 1961, having become home to many Bosnian refugees in the 1990s.
And whereas my mother used to take me out for lunch at the local White Tower, a once popular hamburger chain, this time I stopped near our old house for cevapi.
The thing is, for a city that has lost most of its original reason to exist — the glory days of the Erie Canal are ancient history, and the industries that drove the upstate economy in its heyday are pretty much gone — Utica is doing relatively OK. Those refugees and other immigrants, drawn in part by low housing costs, have helped generate new businesses — Chobani yogurt has a plant nearby — that in turn have partly offset the loss of the old industrial base.
All of which is surprisingly relevant to discussions about the economic future of New York City — which those of us who have lived in or around it tend to call simply “the city” — whose trajectory has probably been permanently altered by Covid-19 and its aftereffects….
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=FBdQ
January 30, 2018
Coincident Indexes for United States and New York, 2017-2021
(Indexed to 2017)
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2021-07/22/c_1310077471.htm
July 22, 2021
Over 1.49 bln doses of COVID-19 vaccines administered in China
BEIJING — Over 1.49 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered in China as of Wednesday, the National Health Commission announced Thursday.
[ Chinese coronavirus vaccine yearly production capacity is now 5 billion doses. Along with over 1.49 billion doses of Chinese vaccines administered domestically, another 570 million doses have been distributed internationally. A number of countries are now producing Chinese vaccines from delivered raw materials. ]
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/us/american-life-expectancy-report.html
July 21, 2021
U.S. Life Expectancy Plunged in 2020, Especially for Black and Hispanic Americans
The 18-month drop, the steepest decline since World War II, was fueled by the coronavirus pandemic.
By Julie Bosman, Sophie Kasakove and Daniel Victor
New federal data draws one of the starkest illustrations to date of how the coronavirus pandemic has disproportionately affected Hispanic and Black Americans, showing that they suffered a far steeper drop in life expectancy in 2020 than white Americans.
Overall, life expectancy in the United States fell by a year and a half, a federal report * said on Wednesday, a decline largely attributed to the pandemic that has killed more than 600,000 Americans.
It was the steepest decline in the United States since World War II.
From 2019 to 2020, Hispanic people experienced the greatest drop in life expectancy — three years — and Black Americans saw a decrease of 2.9 years. White people experienced the smallest decline, of 1.2 years….
* https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/VSRR015-508.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/opinion/haiti-us-history.html
July 21, 2021
We Owe Haiti a Debt We Can’t Repay
By Annette Gordon-Reed
When assassins killed President Jovenel Moïse of Haiti on July 7, pushing the country to the brink of chaos, it may have struck many Americans as the latest in a string of political upheavals and destabilizing disasters in an unfortunate country with which the United States should have little to do. But the revelation that two of the suspects were American citizens was a reminder of the complicated history of our relations with Haiti — a needlessly tragic history, driven by self-interest and the politics of racism. As the United States now offers to help Haiti restore political order, it should be kept squarely in mind that Haiti is more than just a troubled neighbor. It is a nation whose revolutionary fight for freedom helped make the United States the country that it is today….
Annette Gordon-Reed is a professor of law and of history at Harvard.
[ Sorely necessary writing. ]
That map could use some color tweaks to improve the data visualization.
Typically, you would want to have 3 colors diverging with white in the middle representing 0%. Eg https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/monitoring-content/sotc/national/statewidetmaxrank/statewidetmaxrank-202106.png
Mike: Agree, but my technical skills in terms of graphics are quite limited…sorry.
Always willing to help out!
Uh-oh…… somebody just proved (as if they needed to) their Chinese genes. Can you say overly self-critical?? I knew you could.
Something tells me Mother Chinn didn’t raise her no “little emperors”. : )
Why are Wisconsin politicians so dumb?
https://twitter.com/erikhalvorsen18/status/1418550716717731840
my guess is not all the water is treated as well as that found in madison.
Wisconsin has long had a sharp split in its politics, based on deep local immigration patterns too complicated to explicate fully here.
So, it is the state that has produced both progressive Robert M. Lafollette and Joe Mccarthy, with both of them coming out of the GOP, which was founded in Ripon, WI in 1854. Those founding GOPs were definitely of the abolitionist progressive brand, but the Joe Mccarthy branch is now in control there..