The recently ended partial government shutdown is said to have cost the US economy at least $6billion — more than the $5.7billion border wall figure that President Trump shut down the government over.
Financial rating agency Standard & Poor released a report Friday in which it analyzed the cost to the US economy of the partial government shutdown, which finally ended Friday after Trump signed a bill to reopen the federal government for the next three weeks.
The shutdown had clocked in as the longest government shutdown in the country’s history, lasting 35 days, during which many federal workers were either furloughed without pay or told to work without receiving paychecks during that time.
In the report, the S&P said that the overall cost to the US economy — which is worth about $19trillion — would be ‘likely worse than what we had previously expected,’ ABC News reported.
An earlier S&P estimate had stated that the partial government shutdown would have only a ‘modest impact’ on the economy and that it would only lose about $1.2billion of its GDP for each week the shutdown lasted.
In Friday’s report, however, the S&P stated that the upgraded damage to the US economy was due to the fact that ‘weekly costs likely widened beyond the average weekly cost of $1.2 billion.’
‘Here, both direct costs, on lost productivity from furloughed government workers, and indirect costs, from lost economic activity to outside businesses because of the shutdown, amplified with each week the government remained closed,’ the S&P said.