While the global inflation picture remains fixed at firmly normal (as in, disinflationary), US retail sales by contrast have been highly abnormal. You’d think given that, the consumer price part of the economic equation would, well, equate eventually price-wise. Consumers are spending, prices should be heading upward at a noticeable rate. To begin with, consumer spending – as pictured by [...]
Technically, by showing one decimal place maybe this doesn’t exactly qualify. Then again, I was only half serious. When Mexico’s government reported earlier this week that auto production fell by almost 100% in April, I wrote it was suggestive of the great possibly lingering difficulties being forecast for the other side of this economic dislocation. Automakers, basically, aren’t buying the [...]
The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has revised its preliminary estimate of GDP. That can only mean one thing: time to look at corporate profits again. Included along with the recalculated headline output estimate is the BEA’s first run of profit figures. If you are Jay Powell, you aren’t going to like what you find. First, real GDP in the [...]
Over the last decade, the US economy has been experiencing “residual seasonality.” It has begun each year unusually weak. For Economists expecting it take off in each and every one, this is more than a thorny contradiction. When it happened again in 2015, at the worst possible moment for the mainstream view, they had finally had enough. The Bureau of [...]
This is one of those time where so much has happened that in the end it amounts to so very little. The latest GDP estimates included a sharp rise in the current estimates, a reworking of past estimates that seemed to have made the economy much richer, but behind all that the same economic picture as before. As most people [...]
For the second straight quarter, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) estimates US productivity growth was less than 1%. That’s not surprising given the weakening in output as measured by GDP, the data reported by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Productivity is the bridge between the BLS’s labor numbers and the more general economic assessments of the BEA (Private [...]
The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) revised upward fourth quarter 2017 Real GDP. The second estimate had been revised lower to 2.50458% (continuously compounded annual rate of change) from the advanced estimate. The third and final calculation raises the quarterly increase to 2.84707%. None of the changes are substantial. Accompanying these revisions are the BEA’s first assessments for Corporate Profits [...]
If there is a boom here, I just don’t see it. Perhaps the term itself needs to be clearly defined. The common definition is a broad-based and sustained expansion, one that is beneficial to a wide cross-section of any society experiencing it. Since this is still nominally a capitalist system, eroded as it may be in some parts, “broad” would [...]
As much as even the major labor market statistics have picked up on slowing, they wouldn’t have in the first quarter of this year presented enough of it to keep productivity positive. With a very low level of output, once again, calculated labor productivity was for the fourth time over the last six quarters negative. According to the BEA, total [...]
The second estimate for GDP was so similar to the first as to be in all likelihood statistically insignificant. The preliminary estimate for real GDP was given as $16,804.8 billion. The updated figure is now $16,804.1 billion. In nominal terms there was more variation, where the preliminary estimate of $18,860.8 billion is now replaced by one for $18,855.5 billion. Therefore, [...]
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