Rolling over in credit stats, particularly business debt, is never a good thing for an economy. As noted yesterday, in Europe it’s not definite yet but sure is pronounced. The pattern is pretty clear even if we don’t ultimately know how it will play out from here. The process of reversing is at least already happening and so we are [...]
Of all the economic accounts where last year’s big tropical storms would have had the greatest impact, any substantial boost in construction spending made the most sense. What is destroyed is most often quickly rebuilt, particularly in the public arena. One of the core functions of local government is infrastructure, and no local politician can survive long in office if [...]
Real Gross Domestic Product expanded by 2.54% in Q2 2017, below most estimates including the final one from the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model. That latter method was close once again in its final days (+2.8%), but earlier in the quarter was predicting GDP growth of 4.3%. That would have been like what many people were thinking after another awful first [...]
Total new orders for durable goods, including orders for new transportation equipment, were estimated to have been $238.7 billion in March 2017 on a seasonally-adjusted basis. That is 9% better than the most recent low point figured for June last year. It remains substantially less than the record high reached in July 2014, though an anomaly in Boeing’s order history [...]
Nonresidential Fixed Investment, the GDP component most alike capital expenditures, broke above $2.2 trillion in Q4 for the first time in over a year. It was up for the third straight quarter, suggesting that perhaps the start of the year and its near recession could be the worst of at least the appearance of negative signs in business investment. As [...]
The ultimate lesson for learning not to rely on one quarter of GDP growth was actually two quarters. In the middle of 2014, GDP posted back-to-back gains that at the time seemed nothing less than fantastic. Even with residual seasonality revisions and new benchmarks, those two quarters remain prominent landmarks in an otherwise bleak landscape. And that is the whole [...]
Last year, the usual rebound in GDP was flipped. Q1’s are, or were before “residual seasonality”, the low mark followed by some surge at some point. In 2015, it was Q2 that originally jumped, hitting almost 4% in the original estimates. What followed in Q3 was frustration, as GDP was first figured to be only 1.5%. It was disappointing but [...]
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