Europe nearing normality
|Despite the increasing number of reported COVID-19 cases in Europ e, the p ast week's activity indicators have improved and now lie around normal levels. For the first time since March, the Bundesbank weekly activity index was positive, indicating economic improvement in Germany. Furthermore, German retail trade largely recovered from the drop reported last week.
Google mobility numbers have also improved and are back to near-normal levels in large parts of Europe. Spain and the UK lag behind in this regard, largely because of the stringency of their efforts to control the virus.
The infection rate in the US seems to have peaked but economic activity is still at very low levels. The p ast week gave us a further 0.77 p p drop in the Fed's weekly economic index, while restaurant bookings are still 55.7 percent below 2019 levels.
Explanation
In this document, we present a range of high frequency data points in order to assess the current state of key economies. High frequency data is of particular interest in the COVID-19 crisis, as conventional data points come with a significant lag and do not necessarily show the true picture in extraordinary times.
Data series
Google Mobility tracks the (physical) movement trends of people over time and across different categories among the public, such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces and residential. We focus on the retail and recreation category and use this as a measure of ‘social life'.
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