October Lunch Meeting

Program Registration (In-Person Attendees Only): 11:30am-12pm EST

Lunch Served (In-Person Attendees Only): 12pm EST

Presentation (In-Person and Virtual Attendees): 12:00pm-1:30pm EST

Topic: The Delta Variant and the Outlook for the Economy

Speaker: Tim Quinlan - Managing Director and Senior Economist - Wells Fargo

Session Description: Tim Quinlan, a Western NY native, will be joining us for an Economic Update. The number of new COVID cases ramped up sharply in recent months. As a result, Americans have generally become more cautious. Measures of consumer confidence moved lower and the number of people dining out and passing through TSA security at airports have also trended lower over the course of the past couple of months.

With most states unwilling to impose the same sort of restrictions that locked down the economy in the spring of 2020 and with most individuals continuing to go about their daily routines, a significant retrenchment in consumer spending does not appear likely.

We have sharply lowered our full-year GDP growth to 5.9% this year, if realized that would still mark the fastest GDP growth since 1984, but it is not nearly as strong as we were anticipating before the Delta variant sapped confidence. We forecast that real GDP will grow 4.5% in 2022.

Rates of consumer price inflation shot higher earlier this year, but the monthly rate of increase has slowed recently. We look for inflation to steadily recede over the course of 2022, but we suspect that it will continue to exceed the FOMC's desired rate of 2% over most of our forecast period.