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 […]
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 […]
Barry Ritholz keeps us abreast of retail spending: Last month, I published a post on the nonsense that is Black Friday sales (No, Black Friday Sales Were Not Up 16% (not even 6%). That evolved into a Washington Post article, Did Black Friday save the season? Beware the retail hype. Today, we learn that many […]
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. […]
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 […]
By Daniel Becker In the comments to my post “A reminder from Obama’s February 2009 speech”, there is the following: “I guess it relates to the fake Obama they had made up in their heads,…” This sums up the early comments to the post suggesting that those who trusted Obama have only themselves to blame. […]
Bureau of Economic Analysis today reported that real gross domestic product in the US increased at an annual rate of 1.3% in the second quarter of 2011. This (newly revised – see below) acceleration in real GDP was driven primarily by a slowdown in import demand, stronger federal spending, and a pickup in non-residential fixed […]
Note:This was going to be short pieces about things I missed during a week of illness. It turned into a Very Long Piece riffing on two posts from Capital Gains and Games. And that’s without even mentioning the bravura work Stan Collender is doing there: see, for instance, this note that a deficit reduction bill […]
Yesterday I addressed the weak high-frequency indicators, specifically with respect to leading indicators of investment spending on equipment and software (durable goods). I argued that Q2 has not started off well, given that the real core orders for capital goods are down compared to the January to March average. The BEA reported that Q1 2011 […]
They keep calling it a ‘soft patch’ in my business; but when’s the data going to show otherwise? This soft patch is persistent, and durable goods orders confirm it into Q2 2011. Note: The ‘all manufacturing’ orders Y/Y growth rate are available through March only in Datastream for the chart above; the nondefense capital goods […]