Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

GDP Growth Caused By Tax Cuts Has Never Happened

Mike’s post here got me thinking.  I’ll telegraph my conclusion.  He dramatically understated his case. You can see the long range view of nominal and inflation adjusted GPD growth in Graph 1 of FRED quarterly YoY percent change data. Graph 1 YoY growth Nominal and Inflation Adjusted GDP Nominal GDP Growth was in a secular […]

Debt and Growth

Art at The New Arthurian Economics and I are looking at the relationship between debt and economic growth.  Art started with an observation of two FRED series, total credit market debt owed (TCMDO) and Gross Domestic Product (GDP,  nominal or GDPC1, inflation adjusted – take your pick.) Graph 1, from FRED, shows these data series.  […]

Why Spending/GDP is a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Metric For Judging Obama’s Performance

A post like this really shouldn’t be necessary, but part of the right wing canard that Obama has been a profligate spender is based on spending as a percentage of GDP. It looks like this – Graph 1. Graph 1.  Fed Expenditures/GDP Sure enough, by the end of Clinton’s term the ratio had fallen from […]

A Different Look at GDP and Inflation

At Illusion of Prosperity, Stagflationary Mark posted this scatter-graph of quarterly GDP YoY growth and CPI data from Q1, 1948 through Q4, 2011.  Each point represents the differences from the medians of each data set for each of the variables, respectively.  This gives you a picture of time spent above and below what might be […]

Euro Area GDP Report: Not Pretty

by Rebecca Wilder Euro Area GDP Report: Not Pretty Today Eurostat released the second estimate of Q4 2011 Gross Domestic Product. Real Euro area (EA) GDP declined 0.3% over the quarter (-1.3% on an annualized basis). In this release Eurostat provides a breakdown across region, spending categories, and industry, and is much more detailed than […]

Welfare, I’m not hurting from it and neither are you.

A good friend and I got into an email debate. He sent me the latest message regarding how wonderful it is that Florida is going to be drug testing welfare recipients. I responded that I’ll consider the policy when we start testing all the CEO’s who get welfare for their sector of the economy, the […]

GDP Revisions

This is just a short post to illustrate the magnitude of GDP revisions. I downloaded quarterly GDP data from BEA in June 2011. I went back to BEA this morning to update the file. Forgetting about GDP revisions, I thought I’d be adding 2 or three more quarters of data, but discovered that all the […]

Stylized Facts

Net Exports goes negative in 1973 and never recovers. One word: oil. Even the USD depreciation after the Plaza Accord (the one Martin Feldstein likes to pretend was inevitably going to happen then) can’t quite get it back to being positive. And once outsourcing industry to China hits full stride… Private Investment peaks in 2006. […]

A Bleg – Private Consumption Multiplier

from Mike Kimel Hi. For a project I’m working on, I need to find estimates of a private consumption multiplier. That is to say, the multiplier resulting from changes in private consumption rather than, say, from changes in gov’t spending or taxation. Any pointers? Please let me know in comments are by email (mike period […]