Five Alternative Data Points to Watch in the Covid-19 Economy
Lag times in traditional metrics create an opening for other ways to measure the state of the U.S. economy.
Cars at a food bank. That’s an alternative data point, too.
Photographer: Bing Guan/BloombergDuring normal times, traditional economic data work fine, offering reliable insight into growth, employment, prices and all sorts of other aspects of the U.S. economy. The drawback is that delays of as long as a month or even a quarter make some of the data of limited use during times like these, when a pandemic has thrown the entire economy off kilter. So there's a case to be made for the merits of alternative data — everything from new infection rates to apartment rental rates near college campuses — which can offer daily reads of the state of the economy, provided they are used with the appropriate caveats. We recently asked several Bloomberg Opinion writers to cite some of the non-conventional metrics they're paying attention to during the coronavirus recession.
Mohamed A. El-Erian writes about economics, markets and central banks for Bloomberg Opinion. He is the chief economic adviser at Allianz SE, the parent company of Pimco, where he served as CEO and co-CIO:
As many traditional data reports are deemed mostly out of date even before they are released, economists have had no choice but to expand the data they monitor and how they are analyzed.