The BEA’s second estimate of United States third quarter economic growth was released this morning. The revision from the first estimate of 2.0 percent growth was an increase of half a percent to 2.5 percent growth. The revisions were primarily the result of upward revisions to personal consumption expenditures, exports, and state/local government spending. The… Read more

Daryl G. Jones has a piece in Fortune titled Why the housing bulls are wrong.  He’s correct about the housing bulls being wrong, but his reasons aren’t all that convincing to me.  Here’s the reason housing won’t see a robust recovery for a couple of years:  The home ownership rate (percentage of people who own… Read more

The 2009 state-by-state real GDP growth rate estimates were released by the BEA this morning. Given that 2009 was a pivotal year in the Great Recession, we saw lots of variability. There were 38 state economies that experienced contractions, most led by the construction and durables goods manufacturing sectors. The average across all 50 states… Read more

The BLS provided the October Consumer Price Index release today.  The October core CPI year-on-year growth was 0.6 percent.  This is the lowest growth of this measure since 1957.  This rate of growth is low enough that the Fed is concerned that price growth is too low.  In an economy characterized by weak demand, weak… Read more

Despite positive United States economic growth since the third quarter of 2009, job growth continues to be weak, indeed negative until recently. Separately, I have argued that the Fed should be patient and wait for households to rebuild their balance sheets, a process that will take quite some time to complete, and probably can’t be… Read more

Let’s see: The President wants to double exports in five years.* The Treasury is the appropriate department to create and implement a plan to double exports. Tim Geithner runs the Treasury. Tim Geithner denies deliberately weakening the dollar. See why I’m having cognitive dissonance here?  How can you possibly double exports without lowering the cost… Read more

People are getting excited because China’s economy is expected to soon exceed the United States economy in size.   They seem to think this is bad.  Here’s an example.  This is really a stupid thing to worry about, perhaps even a really stupid thing to worry about. China has a population of 1.34 billion, almost 20… Read more