Survey: Business economists sketch a more hopeful outlook

WASHINGTON (AP) — The economic outlook of U.S. business economists has improved over the past three months, though their sunnier view may be jeopardized by the resurgence of the coronavirus.

A survey released Monday by the National Association for Business Economics finds a “significant snap-back in expectations from the depths reached across nearly all categories in April,’’ according to Megan Greene, a senior fellow at Harvard who leads the NABE's survey of business conditions.

The results of the survey of 104 NABE members showed that expectations for growth had brightened considerably, with two-thirds of them forecasting that the economy, as measured by the gross domestic product, will grow between this year’s second quarter and next year's second quarter. Three months ago, by contrast, 70 percent of them had predicted that the economy would shrink over the next 12 months.

The economy did enter a recession in February, ending a record nearly 11-year-long expansion. During the January-March quarter this year, the government estimates that GDP shrank at a 5% annual rate.

This week, when the government will issue its first estimate of GDP for the April-June quarter, the consensus forecast is that it will report that the economy shrank at an annual rate of more than 30%. That would be, by far, the steepest economic contraction on record — more than triple the current worst quarterly drop, which occurred in 1958.

The NABE survey is based on responses received from July 2 to 14, a period when coronavirus cases were starting to spike in many parts of the country after businesses had re-opened. Since then, the impact of the pandemic has grown far worse, with the number of reported cases rising sharply.

Despite the uptick in virus cases, the NABE survey found...