Personal Income & Spending Align
Consumer confidence is at multi-year highs while personal income and wage levels for April were declining on a nominal basis. Without the boost of 0.2% “deflation”, disposable personal income actually declined 0.1% on a nominal basis. Personal spending fell 0.2% on a nominal basis. The internals of the nominal decline related to three separate items .. read more
GDP, Q4 2012 Preliminary
Government spending and inventory builds were good in Q3, according to economists, when they pushed GDP accounting above expectations. Those same two economic accounts dramatically reduced economic activity in Q4, so economists are now intimating that the resulting contraction is something other than real. On the part of government spending, it probably should be ignored .. read more
Personal Income, GDP Revisions & Bad Benchmarks
My theme for 2012 has been that something is different this year than the past two years of even substandard recovery. Recession looms and recent data has done nothing to make me think that trend is anything but hardening. While there was some celebration over the first revision to Q3 GDP, as headline growth was .. read more
1st Quarter US GDP Estimate
The revised 4th Quarter GDP number was released a couple of weeks ago, highlighting a 6.2% decline in total goods and services produced in the US, which included a 4.3% drop in consumer spending, the most in 28 years. Considering the fact that most economists feel that the first quarter of 2009 will be worse than the .. read more
