This poses serious risks to the still-battered US labor market. Yes, the overall jobless rate has come down sharply from 14.7% in April to 6.9% in October, but it remains essentially double the pre-COVID low (3.5%). With weekly claims for unemployment insurance only just starting to creep up in early November as new curfews and other lockdown-like measures are put into place, and a dysfunctional US Congress failing to agree on another relief package, the risk of renewed weakness in overall employment is growing.
The news on vaccines is truly extraordinary. While the logistics of production and distribution are daunting, to say the least, there is good reason to be hopeful that the end of the COVID-19 pandemic may now be in sight. But the impact on the economy will not be instantaneous, with vaccination unlikely to bring about so-called herd immunity until mid-2021 at the earliest.
So, what happens between now and then? For a still vulnerable US economy now in the grips of predictable aftershocks, the case for a relapse, or a double-dip, before mid-2021 is all the more compelling.
To paraphrase Charles Dickens, this is the best of times and the worst of times. As financial markets celebrate the coming vaccine-led boom, the confluence of epidemiological and political aftershocks has pushed us back into a quagmire of heightened economic vulnerability. In Dickensian terms, to reach a “spring of hope,” we first must endure a “winter of despair.”
Stephen S. Roach, former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and the firm's chief economist, is a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute of Global Affairs and a senior lecturer at Yale's School of Management. He is the author of "Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China."