Activity has plateaued amid new virus concerns

Across the board, the positive development in activity has come to a standstill in the latest readings. Much of Europe still seems to be ahead of the US in the normalisation process, with Google mobility levels again being somewhat close to normal in Germany, France and Italy. However, the increase in the number of COVID-19 cases across Europe may have dampened any further improvement the past week and may have been the driver of the significant decline in German retail trade turnover, which fell by 12pp in week 31 relative to week 30. This highlights that activity can quickly change for the worse if people again become worried about becoming infected.

Across the Atlantic, the US is still struggling, with the New York Fed's weekly economic index falling another percentage point to -7.06% in week 31 and restaurant bookings still 58.1% below the 2019 level. On a positive note, US transaction card data has been rising significantly over the past week but the latest data points have tended to see downward revisions recently, so we should not read too much into this yet.

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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