Data Visualizations

Interactives are in Plotly. Last visual is from Seaborn

Code

Data


Unemployment

This plot shows unemployment numbers from 1948 to present. It clearly shows a number of recessions that have hit the US economy, which are annotated here. This also shows the extent to which COVID-19 is a true anomaly in US history. Sources:

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Consumer Sentiment

Consumer sentiment seems to show more month-to-month variation than employment does, though they both are tracking the same economic reality. Consumer sentiment does seem to fall in response to the Great Recession and COVID-19, roughly mirroring the recessions shown in the unemployment graph.

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US Households on Food Stamps

This is significantly smoother than either the consumer sentiment or the unemployment numbers, suggesting the size of this population does not change as rapidly. Food stamp numbers do rise during the Great Recession, and there is one clear 'error' or outlier month in 2019.

It is also worth noting that this is a raw number of households that is not population adjusted, so the number may be growing over time in part due to the larger size of the US population.

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Google Trends on Economic Topics

This graph shows the Google Trends results for three search terms, listed in the legend. Each trend is measured relative to itself, in that every trend will have a score of 100 at its highest search moment (probably also relative to internet search volumes in general).

These search terms were all chosen because of their relevance to important economic metrics.

It is interesting that these do not match exactly. 'Unemployment' and 'food stamps' seem to likely have a strong relationship, and are only scaled differently because of how much 'unemployment' spiked during the COVID-19 crisis. 'cheap gas', on the other hand, seems like it might be more related to gas prices, shown below.

Annotation source: # https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_energy_crisis

Retail Gas Prices

This plot shows monthly retail gas prices in the United States, including a peak in 2008, when gas reached almost $150 a barrel. Source: # https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_energy_crisis