Investopedia launches economic recovery tracker for five cities

Personal finance site Investopedia announced the launch of The City Economic Recovery Tracker (CERT), which is an index compiling economic recovery data of five U.S. cities since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

Investopedia has been analyzing economic recovery data since the pandemic was declared in March, when the 22-year-old website launched the New York City Recovery Index in partnership with NY1 in July 2020. It is now expanding its coverage to four additional cities: Houston, Columbus, Los Angeles and Chicago.

“The economic impact of the pandemic has been profound around the country, but people feel it on a very local level,” said Caleb Silver, Investopedia’s editor in chief, in a statement. “The economic recovery is also very particular to the city you live in, and we created the CERT to allow people to see where the recovery is progressing, and how these five cities compare to one another”

CERT will be updated weekly to provide readers with a practical pulse-check of the economic progress of major metropolitan areas in the U.S. The tracker will measure five key micro and macroeconomic data points — health, jobs and unemployment, small business employees, mobility and restaurants.

CERT is calculated from an un-weighted average of each of the five sub-indices. A reading of 100 is considered “normal.”