Starting from Today the Federal Reserve Bank of New York will begin regular publication of its Weekly Economic Index (WEI) to provide timely information on the state of the U.S. economy amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The index is aimed to provide more timely measures of the US economy. The index will take into account a range of metrics, including retail sales data, unemployment reports or traffic figures.
Today WEI is currently -11.04 %, scaled to four-quarter GDP growth, for the week ending April 11 and -8.42 % for April 4; for reference, the WEI stood at 1.58 % for the week ending February 29.
Accordingly to the NY FED decline in the WEI is driven by the continued fall of fuel sales, to about half the level seen in 2008, due to stay-at-home orders and similar restrictions, considerably lower federal tax withholdings, a fourth successive week of initial unemployment insurance (UI) claims in the millions (4.97 million, not seasonally adjusted), and further decreases in rail traffic and electric utility output.
