STILL IN THE RED

Huge GDP Growth Record Still Not Enough to Lift U.S. Economy Out of COVID Crater

Despite incredible annualized GDP growth of 33.1 percent, the economy in the third quarter still remained 3.5 percent smaller than at the end of 2019.

The United States economy grew a record-shattering 7.4 percent in the third quarter—but it still wasn’t enough to lift the country out of the pandemic-size crater it was sent into by the novel coronavirus. The raw figures, which will inevitably be touted by President Trump as a great success, do not tell the full story. The nation’s gross domestic product spiked at an annualized rate of 33.1 percent—leaving the previous record—a 3.9 percent quarterly increase in 1950—in the dust. However, the size of the U.S. economy in 2020’s third quarter still remained 3.5 percent smaller than the figure at the end of 2019, shortly before the pandemic started wreaking its havoc. “The reason we had such a big bounce is that the economy went from closed to partially open,” Michelle Meyer, head of U.S. economics at Bank of America, explained to The New York Times. “The easy growth was exhausted, and now the hard work has to be done in terms of fully healing.”