PRINTING PULSE ─ Economic Impact
WHAT WILL THE FULL IMPACT BE? Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play? By Richard Romano & Elizabeth Gooding
Source: Department of Labor. Shaded areas indicate recessions.
E
conomic data can only ever paint a portrait of the past. The recent past, to be sure, but the past nonetheless. The monthly value of printing shipments data we regularly present are two months old by the time it is reported (the numbers presented in the sidebar to this article were released in March and include data up through January). The profits data are even less timely; they are only reported quarterly and thus the
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WhatTheyThink - Printing News | May 2020
numbers are only through Q4 2019. This type of data lag is not usually a problem, as we are more interested in long-term trends than in what happened yesterday. We do eagerly await the monthly shipments data and cheer when a month is up, or boo when a month is down, but what’s more important is what is happening in the long run. Monthly, and especially weekly, data can be somewhat “noisy”; there can be things that make a particular data series tick Continued on page 22
