The US economy is expected to contract by 7.9% in the second quarter of the year, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s latest Nowcasting Report showed on Friday. The GDP growth forecast for the first quarter slumped to -0.4%.
“News from this week’s data releases decreased the nowcast for 2020:Q1 by 1.9 percentage points and decreased the nowcast for 2020:Q2 by 7.5 percentage points,” the NY Fed noted in its press release. “Negative surprises from manufacturing, survey, and retail sales data drove the decrease.”
Market reaction
These figures were largely ignored by the market participants and Wall Street’s main indexes were last seen adding between 0.2% and 1.65%.