Britain’s economy returned to growth in the third quarter, but September slowdown worries economists
- Latest: Experts fear economy will shrink in Q4
- Sunak: We’d consider more interventions
- UK suffers worse Covid-19 slump than US, France or Germany
- UK GDP grew 15.5% in last quarter
- Record growth, after worst slump ever, but still 9.7% smaller than pre-Covid
- Growth slowed to 1.1% in September
- Introduction: It’s UK GDP Day
In New York, tech stocks are on the rise while other stocks dip back.
Infection numbers and hospitalizations keep rising in the United States, leading states like New York to reintroduce soft curfews targeting bars and restaurants.
One of president-elect Biden’s covid advisors called for a 4-6 week nationwide shutdown to bring the outbreak back under control, which investors may have interpreted as a taste of what is to come. In other words, it is great that a vaccine is now on the horizon, but markets seem to be absorbing the fact that we won’t get there for several more months and the world economy could remain under severe duress in the meantime.
Meanwhile in America, the number of people filing jobless claims has hit a seven-month low, but remains painfully high as the pandemic rages.
Around 703,000 new ‘initial claims’ for unemployment benefit were filed last week (or Election Night in America Continued” week).
BREAKING: 1 million Americans filed *new* unemployment claims last week, down slightly from prior week.
Over 21 million Americans are currently receiving unemployment aid.
Bottom line: 8 months into this and there's still a lot of pain and layoffs. pic.twitter.com/afMtWSOMAq
Another more than 1.0 million people applied for UI last week, including 709,000 people who applied for regular state UI and 298,000 who applied for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA). PUA expires in just over six weeks. 1/ https://t.co/tg071kRKs8
Last week was the 34th straight week total initial claims were far greater than the worst week of the Great Recession (GR). If you restrict to regular state claims (b/c we didn’t have PUA in the GR), initial claims are still more than 3 times where they were a year ago. 3/
For now, after an individual exhausts regular state benefits, they can move onto Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC), which is an additional 13 weeks of regular state UI. But PEUC expires in just over six weeks. 5/