Alas, it appears that the government data may have dramatically underrepresented the full severity of the recent plunge.  As a reminder, the Census Bureau takes unadjusted numbers and smooths them through the X-14-Arima goalseekarator, which however has never before had to apply a Fourier transformation to an economy which overnight entered a hard stop. That's why the unadjusted data is far more important to get a true sense of the severity of the current plunge. And since consumer spending accounts for 70% of US GDP, having an accurate read of just how far it has fallen is critical not only to gauge the change in GDP, but corporate profitability which as JPMorgan calculated previously, has a 7x beta to changes in GDP.

To do that, we used Bank of America's credit and debit card data for the month of March. What it showed is that while the standard measure of spending - retail sales ex-autos - was down just 1.6% month-over-month (mom) seasonally adjusted, total card spending was down a severe 11.5% mom SA. The difference speaks to the composition of each measure as retail  sales ex-autos exclude the hardest hit sectors from COVID-19 such as travel and other types of services.