Wall Street is growing increasingly worried about darker days ahead with the Dow tumbling 943 points, or 3.4 percent, on Wednesday on a sharp spike in Covid-19 cases in the U.S. and Europe and the lack of fresh rescue money coming out of Washington. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq also both dropped at a similar pace, marking the biggest sell-off on Wall Street since June.

Even a gain as big as 35 percent on an annualized basis in the third-quarter GDP growth — while an all-time high — would not get the U.S. economy back to where it was at the end of the first quarter. And it would take a far bigger jump to get the economy back to where it would have been had Covid-19 not slammed the country at all.

Economists and Wall Street analysts now expect much slower growth in the fourth quarter and early next year than they previously expected, given that the roughly $4 trillion in federal stimulus spending that propped up consumers and businesses through the end of the summer has largely faded.