- Nearly half of American teens surveyed by Piper Sandler said they're worried about the economy.
- The percentage of Gen-Z fearing a potential recession is up from 28% last year, the Wall Street firm said.
- In fact, the first mention of coronavirus by a respondent even pre-dated most Western governments' responses.
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American teenagers, largely stuck at home with their parents and relegated to online school, are growing increasingly worried about a potential economic recession.
47% of US teens surveyed by the Wall Street firm Piper Sandler in its semi-annual Gen-Z survey said the economy is getting worse, a major uptick from previous years.
"There were several more mentions of the economy and the stock market than in prior surveys," the firm noted. Last year, only 28% of the group said "they believed the economy was getting worse."
The survey of 5,200 US teens was taken as the coronavirus accelerated from largely a foreign concern in February and concluded in late March, the very week a record number of Americans lost their jobs as non-essential businesses closed across the country. The pandemic was the second most-listed social/political concern, the firm said, behind the environment.
"In fact, the timestamp of the first teen who highlighted 'Coronavirus' as a concern was from February 18 - much earlier than most Western governments," the analysts said.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, young peoples' economic concerns, while rising, still trail their parents. According to a Gallup poll released at the end of March, the percentage of American adults worried that the coronavirus is "very likely" to cause a recession nearly doubled to 61% in two weeks' time. That's even before weekly jobless claims skyrocketed to more than 6 million, doubling the previous week's record.
As of Wednesday morning, nearly 400,000 cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, were confirmed in the United States, according to Johns Hopkins University.
