An RV Boom Won’t Save the Economy
Recreational vehicles stand out in a coronavirus-transformed travel landscape, but their role as an economic bellwether is limited.
One way to ride out the pandemic.
Photographer: George Frey/BloombergIt happened again! Just as in 1990, 2000 and 2007, a decline in recreational-vehicle shipments preceded a recession.
Of course, unless you believe that RV dealers knew back in summer 2018 (when the shipment decline began) that a new coronavirus would emerge from China a year and a half later and bring the global economy to a standstill, there’s no plausible connection between the RV swoon and the recession that started in March.2 As with the warning signal supposedly flashed by last year’s inverted yield curve, RV shipments will look like they again passed muster as a recession indicator, but they didn’t really.