With some places starting to leave quarantine in various forms, I'm looking for indicators to get a sense of when the economy is starting to recover.<p>Does anyone have any favorite real-time (or near real-time) economic indicators? One example is opentable's "State of the Restaurant Industry" (https://www.opentable.com/state-of-industry), which shows the previous day's bookings rate. I'm not looking for ones global in scope, just ones that are short-term and not obvious (such as stock market indices, oil prices). Other examples could be traffic, electricity loadings, etc.<p>Many indicators published by governments are lagging indicators (e.g., unemployment numbers, WARN notices). I'm curious to get a sense if people are starting to return to normal life.
For the global economy, the Baltic Dry Index. It's a benchmark for the price of moving major raw materials by sea. Surprisingly, it's at about the same value as last year at this time - so not horrible - and seems to have bottomed out last month. Good news overall.<p><a href="https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/baltic" rel="nofollow">https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/baltic</a>