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US Business Newsletter
August 01 - August 15, 2021
Greetings from Consulate General of India,
New York!
Welcome to the August 2021 edition of our newsletter, bringing you important policy and high-impact news about India.
We hope you find it useful.
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A Forum for Indian Businesses in North East USA
(Covering: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire,
New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont)
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American biotechnology is booming
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The pandemic has highlighted the promise of clever new drugs—and the firms developing them. In the past year, the biotech darling has become synonymous with the fight against covid-19. Its ingenious mrna vaccine has, like a similar one developed by Pfizer, an American drug giant, and BioNTech, a German startup, saved millions of lives. Moderna’s success has also brought attention to America’s biotechnology industry, a lot of it centred on Cambridge. And the industry is booming. Since 2010 an index of biotech firms listed on the Nasdaq exchange has quintupled in value (see chart), and the number of companies in it has more than doubled, to 269. Between 2011 and 2020 the money that biotech startups raised in American initial public offerings (IPOS) ballooned from $4bn to $65bn. So far this year venture capitalists have poured more than $20bn into pharmaceutical and biotech firms, not far from last year’s record tally of $27bn. |
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Consumer Prices Keep Climbing as Fed and White House Await a Cool-Down
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A key inflation gauge again climbed 5.4 percent in July from a year earlier. Prices gains are expected to moderate — the question is by how much and how quickly. Consumer prices rose at a rapid clip in July as the reopening of the economy kept inflation elevated at levels that are making officials at the Federal Reserve squirm while posing a political problem for the Biden White House.
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The Wedding Business Is Booming, a Short-Term Jolt to the Economy
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Weddings are roaring back after a pandemic-induced slump, leading to booked-up venues, a dearth of photographers and rising prices on catered dinners. As demand picks up, it’s providing an additional jolt of spending to the U.S. economy. The race to the aisle is payback after a lost year of ceremonies. As lockdowns swept the nation, weddings slowed abruptly at the onset of the pandemic. Shane McMurray, founder of The Wedding Report, estimates that 1.3 million marriages took place in the United States last year, compared with the typical 2.1 million. Those were often “micro-weddings,” according to industry insiders, with just a handful of guests, if any were present at all. |
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Will the Pandemic Productivity Boom Last?
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Fewer workers are making more stuff. If it lasts, that’s big news for the economy of the 2020s. For most of the last 15 years, the United States economy was mired in a period of low productivity growth. Who would have guessed that the pathway out of it might include a pandemic? Yet that is what the numbers show. Since the second quarter of 2020, labor productivity — the amount of output per hour of work — has risen at a 3.8 percent annual rate, compared with 1.4 percent from 2005 to 2019. A different way to look at it: Since the pandemic recession bottomed out in the spring of 2020, the nation’s gross domestic product has more than fully recovered, with second-quarter output 0.8 percent higher than before coronavirus. The number of jobs decreased 4.4 percent in the same span. Productivity growth accounts for most of the wedge between those. What is less clear, though, is how much this growth represents real progress toward deploying the workforce in ways that will make Americans richer over time. It’s a murky story — like any attempt to connect big-picture productivity numbers to what’s happening in the guts of the economy — but crucial for understanding the economic outlook for the 2020s. |
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Address: Consulate General of India,
3 East 64th street (Between 5th and Madison Avenues),
New York, NY 10065
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