The US economy is surging and life is returning to normal. Consumers have healthy balance sheets and inflation is a hot topic. Companies in hard-hit industries are even talking about having a difficult time finding staff. The Fed seems to be seeing a different picture of the economy though and has no intention of tapering pandemic era stimulus until it’s clear that the economy has returned to maximum employment and inflation is running above 2%.
Vaccines continue to be administered and supply will likely open up, even more, starting in April. Consumers have been dreaming of a return to normal and we appear to be at the cusp. The result of vaccination could be an explosion of pent-up demand for hardest-hit industries and a much better second half than people expect. Still, strong demand is putting pressure on supply chains and creating inflationary pressures. Given that stimulus is dependent on a K-shaped recovery, normalization could bring its own economic disruptions.
Succinct Summary: Consumer spending remains strong and Black Friday was successful. A third wave of COVID has made the near term outlook worse, but the medium to long term looks much brighter thanks to vaccines. Tech spending continues to outpace overall GDP growth and probably will continue to surge after the pandemic is over. The driver of spending has moved from devices towards data infrastructure and management.
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Succinct Summary: Most parts of the economy have normalized and the economic winners are booming. Technology, cloud service and e-commerce are leading the way and other industries are surging as well. Financial service firms focused on M&A advisory, trading and restructuring are seeing strong business. The housing market is also on fire with new home sales up 32% y/y. This week’s election and a renewed wave of COVID could dampen activity, but for now, the economy is doing remarkably well. COVID may have led to structurally higher productivity.
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Succinct Summary: There were a lot of major data points about the economy last week but the biggest news of all seemed to be just how well tech companies did despite the massive economic dislocation. In a quarter where GDP fell at a 33% annualized rate, Apple managed to grow revenue by 11%! Stimulus probably played some role in tech companies’ strong performance, but beyond the stimulus is the fact that COVID has pushed everyone to spend even more time at home and on the internet. The behavioral shifts appear to be long-lasting too. 20 years after the dot com bubble, the internet is still not done reshaping society.
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