On June 8, 2020, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) issued a statement announcing that its Business Cycle Dating Committee determined U.S. economic activity had reached a cyclical peak in February 2020. Beginning in March 2020, a multitude of economic indicators declined sharply as public health orders that required nonessential businesses to close were implemented during the ear... Read More

This blog post is the fourth in a series that discusses how the current pandemic affects the financial positions of publicly traded U.S. corporations, the potential implications of these financial developments, and the federal policy response. In this post, we discuss the adjustments to federal tax policy that have been initiated to support U.S. businesses and their possible effects. These me... Read More

This blog post is the third in a series that discusses how the current pandemic affects the financial positions of publicly traded U.S. corporations, the potential implications of these financial developments, and the federal policy response. In this post, we attempt to quantify the risk to the solvency and to the liquidity of U.S. public corporations, and how this risk can be reduced or... Read More

This blog is the second in a series that discusses how the current pandemic affects the financial positions of publicly traded U.S. corporations, the potential implications of these financial developments, and the federal policy response. The first blog discussed the financial positions before the pandemic started. It documented that many nonfinancial publicly traded companies entered 20... Read More

This blog is the first in a series that will discuss how the current pandemic affects the financial positions of publicly traded U.S. corporations, the potential implications of these financial developments, and the federal policy response. This first blog discusses the financial positions before the pandemic started. We document three facts: (1) the share of nonfinancial public companies wit... Read More

A series that discusses how the current pandemic affects the financial positions of publicly traded U.S. corporations, the potential implications of these financial developments, and the federal policy response. Part 1, Before the Pandemic Part 2, The Covid-19 Earnings Shock Part 3, Projecting Liquidity and Solvency Risks Part 4, Tax Relief Part 5, The Main Street Lending... Read More

Update #2, June 12, 2020: Following the release of the latest Current Population Survey estimates and related micro data, we are able to calculate the U-Cov rate for May, which was 27.6% (not seasonally adjusted). This was a 3.1 percentage point decrease from April, but still 17.0 percentage points above its February 2020 rate. In comparison, the official “U3” unemployment rate fell by 1.4 percen... Read More

In this blog post, we document that recent revisions to the Chicago Fed’s National Financial Conditions Index (NFCI) have been large and clustered in time—a pattern not seen since the 2007–09 global financial crisis. As financial conditions tightened early on during the Covid-19 outbreak here in the U.S., there were large positive revisions to the NFCI through much of March. We show that revi... Read More

This blog post updates our earlier analysis of the potential jobs impacted by Covid-19. The update reflects three adjustments to the original analysis. First, we updated our guesses on the shares of each industry employed and working at still-operating businesses based on the Labor Department’s March Employment Situation report. Second, we use an updated model to estimate the possible June un... Read More

Summary Economists forecast the unemployment rate all the time. Usually, though, they use data over the previous months and quarters to forecast the unemployment rate out several years. Since the relationships between the unemployment rate and things like GDP growth and employment are mostly stable over time, and since month-to-month movements in the unemployment rate are usually small, ... Read More