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“The WEI,” says the St. Louis Fed, “is an index of real economic activity using timely and relevant high-frequency data. It represents the common component of ten different daily and weekly series covering consumer behavior, the labor market, and production. The WEI is scaled to the four-quarter GDP growth rate; for example, if the WEI reads -2 percent and the current level of the WEI persists for an entire quarter, one would expect, on average, GDP that quarter to be 2 percent lower than a year previously.”
USAGOLD note: As you can see, the drop since early March is worse than the one during the 2008 financial crisis. The Index was developed by Daniel Lewis, economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Karel Mertens, senior economic policy advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and James Stock, Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy, Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University, so it is highly credentialed. If its current readings go unchanged through the end of the quarter, it would portend a roughly 11% drop in GDP from 2019.