Durable Goods (Economic Indicator)

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Growth Is Strong, but the Obstacles to Full Recovery Are Big

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The new G.D.P. numbers paint a vivid picture of a nation still struggling to complete an economic readjustment.A house under construction in Culver City, Calif., last fall. Despite great demand for housing, the sector actually contracted last quarter because of supply constraints.Chris Delmas/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMost of the time, a 6.5 percent rate of economic growth would warrant celebrations in the streets. Only in the weird economy of 2021 can it be a bit of a disappointment.It’s not simply that forecasters had expected a G.D.P. growth number that was a couple of percentage points higher, though they did. And it’s not even that America’s output remains below its prepandemic growth path in inflation-adjusted terms, though it is.What makes the new G.D.P. numbers on Thursday feel less than buoyant is the degree to which they reflect a nation still struggling to complete a huge economic readjustment.The report offers some sunny signs, certainly. Growth for the first half of the year easily outpaced the rates mainstream forecasters envisioned late last year, and strong growth in business equipment investment bodes well for the future.But it is an uneven economy — bursting at the seams in some sectors, while still depressed in others. The new numbers show an economy with plenty of demand, but where supply constraints in certain sectors are binding, reducing the overall pace of growth beneath what ought to be possible.Consider the housing sector. The industry is in some ways experiencing a boom, with home prices (and increasingly, rents) rising fast. Yet in terms of the G.D.P. accounting, residential investment became a big negative in the second quarter, contracting at a 9.8 percent annual rate.If builders can’t get lumber, drywall, appliances and the like at prices to “pencil out,” or to make economic sense, they can’t build houses. And so despite extraordinary demand for houses, the sector actually subtracted half a percentage point from the overall G.D.P. growth rate.There was a similar 7 percent rate of contraction in investment in business structures, which probably reflects a mix of supply constraints and uncertain future demand for certain classes of commercial real estate like offices and hotels.Then there are inventories of goods, which subtracted 1.1 percentage points from the second-quarter growth rate. Economists tend to ignore swings in inventories, as they tend not to reveal much about the future direction of the economy. In this case, though, the inventory decline is telling. It is consistent with what businesses are saying about having to draw down inventories as they struggle to keep up with demand (think, for example, of auto sales lots with far fewer cars and trucks to choose from than usual).Meanwhile, the great readjustment in the economy that needs to happen between consumption of goods versus services — although it continued in the second quarter — still has a long way to go.Consider a hypothetical world where the pandemic had never happened, and instead the economy kept growing as forecasters in January 2020 had expected it would, with the various segments of G.D.P. retaining a steady share of the economic pie.Services consumption in the second quarter remained 7.4 percent below the level it would have maintained in that alternate universe, while spending on durable goods remained 34 percent higher.Those are extraordinary shifts in what the economy is being asked to produce, and it is hardly shocking that the physical goods side of the economy would be straining at capacity in light of such an epic reallocation of demand.What has happened in recent months is not Americans shifting spending away from physical goods and toward services, but rather buying more of both, however with varying growth rates. Spending on durable goods rose at a 9.9 percent rate in the second quarter after a 50 percent rise in the first quarter. Spending on services rose 12 percent in the second quarter.Those numbers are, in effect, driving the supply strains for many physical goods.Moreover, the second-quarter data predates the surge in virus cases from the Delta variant. We don’t know yet whether its spread will affect the economy in any meaningful way, but if it does, the likely effects include making supply strains of physical goods worse and slowing the rebalancing of the economy toward services.It would be unrealistic to expect the economic trauma of 2020 to be fixed in just a few quarters, but what the drumbeat of data — both on economic output and employment — shows is that it really is going to be a grind to arrive at a new equilibrium.It’s fantastic news, of course, that the economic expansion remains robust. There was only a single quarter from 2001 to 2019 in which the annualized growth rate exceeded 6 percent; in 2021 there have now been two in a row.The healing is happening. But the new numbers reflect just how severe the scars of last year really were. More

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    The Economy Is (Almost) Back. It Is Looking Different Than It Used To.

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    The recovery is profoundly unequal across sectors, unbalanced in ways that have big implications for businesses and workers.There have been a lot of strange economic numbers over the last 14 months, as the world has been whipsawed by the pandemic. But one particular line of the first-quarter G.D.P. numbers released Thursday stands out even so.Americans’ spending on durable goods — cars and furniture and other goods meant to last a long time — rose at a stunning 41.4 percent annual rate in the first three months of the year. Enjoy your Pelotons and Big Green Eggs, everybody.The central reality of the economy in 2021 is that it’s profoundly unequal across sectors, unbalanced in ways that have enormous long-term implications for businesses and workers.The economy is recovering rapidly, and is on track to reach the levels of overall G.D.P. that would have been expected before anyone had heard of Covid-19. But that masks some extreme shifts in composition of what the United States is producing. That matters both for the businesses on the losing end of those shifts and for their workers, who may need to find their way into the growing sectors.In such a tumultuous time, it helps to look at the G.D.P. numbers not in terms of how they changed compared with last quarter or last year, but with the prepandemic economy. How does the actual number in the first quarter compare with what that number would have been if it had grown at a steady 2 percent annual rate since the end of 2019, the last quarter unaffected by the pandemic.This approach confirms the basic idea that the economy is not far from that prepandemic trend line. In the first quarter, overall G.D.P. was only 3.3 percent below where it would have been in that hypothetical pandemic-free world. The United States is on track to surge above that 2019 trend in the second quarter currently underway.But as the extreme spike in first-quarter numbers reflects, there has been a huge reallocation of economic activity toward durable goods. Spending on cars and trucks is 15.1 percent higher than it would have been on the 2019 trajectory; spending on furnishings and durable household equipment is 16.6 percent higher; and spending on recreational goods is a whopping 26 percent higher.Altogether, durable goods spending is running $348.5 billion higher annually than it would have been in that alternate universe, as Americans have spent their stimulus checks and unused travel money on physical items.The housing sector is experiencing nearly as big a surge. Residential investment was 14.4 percent above its prepandemic trend, representing $90 billion a year in extra activity. And that was surely constrained by shortages of homes to sell, and lumber and other materials used to make them. It is poised to soar further in coming months, based on forward-looking data like housing starts.Another bright spot is business investment in information technology. The tech industry has been comparatively unscathed by the crisis. Spending on information processing equipment in the first quarter was 23 percent higher than its prepandemic trend, and investment in software 7.4 percent higher.Then there are the losers.The troubles of service industries, especially related to travel, are well documented. While spending on restaurants, airline tickets, concerts and other recreational activities grew in the first quarter, it was a considerably smaller surge than the one that went to physical items, and not nearly big enough to fill in the deep hole those sectors face. Spending on transportation services remains 23 percent below its prepandemic trend, recreation services 31 percent, and restaurants and hotels 19 percent.Those three sectors alone represent $430 billion in “missing” economic activity — largely equivalent, it’s worth noting, to the combined shift of economic activity toward durable goods and residential real estate.A corollary shows up in trade data. Services exports are down 26 percent compared with the prepandemic trend, which reflects in significant part the freeze-up in global travel.Less widely understood is a steep pullback in the energy sector.There are two sides of the same coin: Consumer spending on gasoline and other energy goods is down 11 percent from its prepandemic trend line. And business spending on structures is down 19 percent, which reflects a pullback in investment by both the oil extraction industry and the commercial real estate sector.Separately, the pullback in state and local governments, many of which have faced funding crunches, is real. Their spending is 4.3 percent below the prepandemic trend, another $89 billion in lost activity, though that is likely to return as federal stimulus dollars flow to their coffers and schools reopen.In every recession, shifts take place in the composition of economic activity; the economy rarely looks the same after a wrenching event as it did before. But what is striking about this crisis is the scale and speed of the economy’s rewiring.We don’t yet know how fully service industries will recover as vaccinations take place, or whether durable goods spending will return to more normal levels as stimulus checks are spent and people reallocate their budgets toward travel. We also don’t know whether the surge in information technology spending and the pullback in oil drilling are part of a longer-term shift in the economy (all the more so given the Biden administration’s emphasis on clean energy investment).Moreover, to the degree these shifts in the composition of the economy may be semi-permanent, we don’t know how seamlessly the economy will adjust. Many former waiters or hotel clerks may be ill-suited to becoming construction workers or software engineers.That’s what makes the economy of 2021 so promising but also worrying. The boom is here. We just don’t know yet how bumpy the ride will be in trying to return to something that feels like full-fledged prosperity. More