One of the major reasons I expects sluggish growth and weak earnings is the secular decline in the growth of real net fixed nonresidential investment. The dominant factor driving productivity growth is workers being provided additional capital equipment to assist them. For instance, employees of a B2B company may improve their productivity if payment solutions […]
Economic Cycles Even with the rebound in second quarter growth, first half growth was still under 2%. Moreover, newly revised real GDP data reports even slower growth over the past few years. For some five years the consensus has forecast stronger growth right around the corner, despite the fact that it has consistently been too […]
In recent weeks there has been much discussion about the seasonal adjustment factors for GDP understating growth. The evidence seems pretty strong and BEA says they are working on an adjustment. But remember, the seasonal adjustment factor have to sum to one (1.00). If you change the seasonal adjustment factors to add two percentage points […]
Jeff Jacoby had an interesting article in the Boston Globe on Sunday where he argue that if the demand for something doubled the price must increase—it is basic introductory economics. What price is too high for a miracle drug? His argument is so typical of how so many columnist and/or bloggers demonstrate that a little […]
The Census Bureau had a press release this morning announcing that nominal retail sales fell -0.6% in February, the third consecutive fall. Wall Street economists,analysts, strategists and managers have been watching these weak retail sales reports and speculating on why the drop in oil prices has not lead to the boost in consumer spending that […]
Thought people would find this of interest. This is not updated from September being the last observation. In 1999 when this bottomed West Texas Intermediate was under $12/bbl and gasoline was under $1/ gal.
The opponents of Obama-care just will not give up. Just because all of their claims of disaster over the last few years have been proven wrong they continue to repeat every claims that they think does not make them look foolish. The latest example is John R. Graham of the Independent Institute who claims that […]
I keep seeing references to the 1970’s stagnation that reflect a consensus belief that real GDP growth in the 1970s was significantly lower in the 1970s than in the 1980s. But this is contrary to the data: REAL GDP GROWTH( % ) 1970…0.21……..1980…-0.04 1971….3.29……..1981….2.58 1972….5.25……..1982…-1.91 1973…..5,64…….1983….4.63 1974….-0.52…….1984….7.26 1975….-0.20…….1985…..4.24 1976….5.34………1986…..3.51 1977…..4.61………1987…..3.46 1978…..5.56………1988….4.20 1979……3.18………1979….3.68 […]
I can not believe the nerve of Greg Mankiw posting a blog about the Veterans Administration having problems. He suggests giving Vets a voucher. I suggest that he should apologize to all the Vets for the War and Tax cuts policies that were implemented while he was at the White House that created the problem […]
The Bureau of Economic Analysis has been working on creating state and metro cost of living indices for several years and they have just published a new set of them that can be used to create real per capita income comparisons between states. In their press release they show a map comparing real growth in […]