The reopening of businesses shut due to the coronavirus pandemic is fueling optimism on Wall Street that the U.S. economy is on the path to recovering from a steep recession.
How quickly that recovery happens hinges on the outbreak subsiding and on Americans feeling confident and safe enough to return to their pre-lockdown habits.
For an up-to-the-minute read on consumer behavior, Wall Street is monitoring the number of people moving through airport security checkpoints, restaurant reservations and gasoline demand, among other data. This information is particularly valuable now because conventional economic reports on hiring, consumer confidence and spending can lag a month or more.
“We’re looking at them as an indicator of consumer behavior, and really consumer trust in the health infrastructure,” said Nela Richardson, investment strategist at Edward Jones. “What this high frequency data is telling us is that behavior is starting to recover, and that’s a good sign for the reopening, if it continues.”
The Transportation Security Administration’s daily tally of people moving through its checkpoints at airports indicates that more Americans are taking to the skies, though the tally remains far below where it was a year ago.
For example, 417,924 people moved through TSA airport checkpoints Tuesday. That’s down 83% from the same day last year, when the TSA counted 2.47 million travelers. Still, the steep drop-off marks an improvement from the same day in April, when passenger traffic sank 96.4%.
Government data also suggests more Americans are driving than just a couple of months ago. The four-week average of daily U.S. gasoline demand was 7.64 million barrels as of last week, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That’s down about 21% from a year earlier. But it’s up sharply since April 24, when the four-week average of daily demand slumped to 5.33 million barrels.
Analysts are keeping an eye on restaurant reservation app OpenTable too, to gauge consumers’ willingness to leave home and share space with other restaurant patrons.
The latest data, based on a sample of roughly 20,000 restaurants, show the number of seated diners from online, phone and walk-ins remains sharply lower from a year ago. The snapshot on Wednesday, for example, showed a 65.2% drop. But it’s an improvement from the 100% decline through much of March and April.