Four High Frequency Indicators for the Economy

 SOURCE:

Calculated Risk: Four High Frequency Indicators for the Economy (calculatedriskblog.com)

These indicators are mostly for travel and entertainment.    It is interesting to watch these sectors recover as the pandemic subsides.  Notes: I've added back gasoline supplied to see if there is an impact from higher gasoline prices.

----- Airlines: Transportation Security Administration -----

The TSA is providing daily travel numbers.

This data is as of August 28th.

This data shows the 7-day average of daily total traveler throughput from the TSA for 2019 (Light Blue), 2020 (Black), 2021 (Blue) and 2022 (Red).

The dashed line is the percent of 2019 for the seven-day average.

The 7-day average is down 4.9% from the same day in 2019 (90.9% of 2019).  (Dashed line) 

Air travel - as a percent of 2019 - has been moving sideways over the last several months, off about 10% from 2019 - with some ups and downs, usually related to the timing of holidays.

----- Movie Tickets: Box Office Mojo -----

This data shows domestic box office for each week and the median for the years 2016 through 2019 (dashed light blue).  

Black is 2020, Blue is 2021 and Red is 2022.  

The data is from BoxOfficeMojo through August 25th.

Note that the data is usually noisy week-to-week and depends on when blockbusters are released.  

Movie ticket sales were at $109 million last week, down about 41% from the median for the week.

----- Hotel Occupancy: STR -----

This graph shows the seasonal pattern for the hotel occupancy rate using the four-week average.

The red line is for 2022, black is 2020, blue is the median, and dashed light blue is for 2021. Dashed purple is 2019 (STR is comparing to a strong year for hotels).

This data is through August 20th. The occupancy rate was down 2.8% compared to the same week in 2019.

The 4-week average of the occupancy rate is below the median rate for the previous 20 years (Blue).

Notes: Y-axis doesn't start at zero to better show the seasonal change.

----- Gasoline Supplied: Energy Information Administration -----

This graph, based on weekly data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), shows gasoline supplied compared to the same week of 2019.

Blue is for 2020.  Purple is for 2021, and Red is for 2022.

As of August 19th, gasoline supplied was down 12.4% compared to the same week in 2019.

Recently gasoline supplied has been running somewhat below 2019 and 2021 levels - and sometimes below 2020.