The third quarter of 2021 saw its slowest economic growth since the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, though much-needed improvement could be just around the corner, CNBC reports.
The aftermath of the pandemic leaves the national economy in disarray as labor shortages continue and inflation threatens to extend an already delayed financial recovery.
Governments around the world spent trillions to smooth the impact of the abrupt curtailment of activity in the second quarter of 2020, but no one knew how the world would get back to business.
At first, the U.S. economy rebounded sharply, but a year later third quarter gross domestic product grew at just 2%, way below initial estimates, because of the uneven activity and extreme mismatches of supply and demand.
“What we’re seeing is an economy with millions of individual decisions having to cope with these large changes,” said Vincent Reinhart, chief economist at Mellon. “It’s a modern economy that has gotten more and more complicated...It’s a very complicated machine to restart.”