The initial estimate of United States third quarter GDP was released today. The economy grew at 2.5 percent, driven mostly by consumption growth of 2.4 percent and investment in equipment & software of 17.4 percent. Growth was slightly augmented by investment in structures and the improvement in net exports. The government sector’s impact on GDP was… Read more

Previously published September 28 in the “California Economic Forecast”: The saga of the Great Recession continues. Over six million people have been unemployed for more than 27 weeks, and job growth may be slow enough in the next few months that the unemployment rate rises again. Major revisions to GDP, released in late July, show… Read more

Interest rate spreads are returning to higher levels, levels that indicate financial and economic instability. This could indicate that an economic regime shift may occur this year. The normalized TED, which is the 3 month LIBOR minus the 3-month Treasury divided by the 3-month Treasury, has reached a level not seen since the fall of 2008.… Read more

Today’s jobs data release was below our forecast, and that is bad. It is even worse, when one considers the productivity data released earlier in the week. That report showed that productivity has fallen in each of the past three consecutive quarters. This is the most sustained decline since 1979. Productivity used to have a… Read more

We’ve seen more and more forecasters and analysts revising their forecast down. In fact, after being among the lowest for years, we’re now almost consensus. Remember, they came to us. Downward revisions to United States gross domestic product (GDP) have driven most of the revisions. For about two years, we had trouble with the original… Read more

Jeffrey Speakes Downgrade On Friday, August 5 after the market close, Standard and Poor’s (S&P) announced a downgrade of U.S. Treasury debt from AAA to AA+. This announcement followed Congressional approval of a debt limit increase and ten year plan to cut projected deficit relative to baseline by $2.1 trillion. Evidently, the debt deal was… Read more

Michael Puente and Dan Hamilton The BLS’s July Employment Situation was released today. Non-farm jobs grew by 117,000, highly focused on healthcare, (31,000), retail, (26,000), manufacturing, (24,000), and mining (9,000). Despite the increase in jobs, the measured employment level, an alternate measure of workers, decreased. That decrease was met by a larger decrease to the… Read more

Continuing my commentary on last Friday’s GDP release, here is a chart showing the revisions to real GDP growth. It might seem like some quarters are up and some are down, in effect a wash. Despite that appearance, on net, the new measure implies that growth was slower during the 2007 through 2011 quarter 1… Read more

Until today, we’ve been confident that we could avoid a double-dip recession.  Too be sure, we’ve acknowledged that risks abound, particularly in the Middle East and in the Eurozone.  However, the recovery seemed to be proceeding about as we had expected, slowly, certainly slower than most forecasts. We believed that the United States economy, absent… Read more

The United States Employment Situation was released this morning and the glimmer of hope that I had been nurturing as the February, March, and April data came out has been weakened. While the May public sector jobs result was like I forecasted, the private sector jobs result was much weaker. Non-farm jobs increased 54 thousand… Read more