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Via the BEA:
Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — increased at an annual rate of 3.1 percent in the third quarter of 2012 (that is, from the second quarter to the third quarter), according to the "third" estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the second quarter, real GDP increased 1.3 percent.
The last estimate was 2.7%.
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The devil’s always in the details:
The acceleration in real GDP in the third quarter primarily reflected upturns in private inventory investment and in federal government spending, a downturn in imports, an upturn in state and local government spending, and an acceleration in residential fixed investment that were partly offset by a downturn in nonresidential fixed investment and a deceleration in exports. (Emphasis added.)
Peter spending Paul’s money to buy stuff in which Peter doesn’t invest, nor consume, and from which Peter can’t be employed, doesn’t do all that much for Mary, especially over the long term, and in any event is not sustainable. If you catch my drift.
And inventory adjustments often are quite temporary. Since the Dollar has been relatively stable, and not down YTD materially, that downturn in imports indicates a lack of demand. No bueno. A downturn in commercial real estate is no bueno. At least there was that uptick in residential real estate. I wouldn’t bet the farm on that continuing, however.
Apparently Doug is so depressed by the good economic news that he us unable to post.
Considering that shrinking Government and a flat residential market have been what’s holding back the economic recovery…the upticks in Government spending and residential construction that Tsar hi-lited, and thinks are bad news, are actually good news. Unless of course, like most Republicans, you are un-interested in economic recovery. And then it is indeed bad news.
It appears that voters on November 6th sensed a better recovery than the numbers showed, and thus re-elected Obama by a significant number (also revised upward to nearly 4%). Republicans, banking on a shitty economy as their only hope of obscuring their lack of message and/or good ideas, didn’t get the memo. It was probably lost in the same delivery as the voter make-up memo.
We muddle through. There’s a lot of deleveraging to do – household debt levels being the big one, but also local & state government. The Feds too, though that’s much, much less pressing.
That takes time, it’s painful, and the result is sluggish economic growth. I’m not doing backflips here, but it seems to me we’re on an ok path.
Peter spending Paul’s money to buy stuff in which Peter doesn’t invest, nor consume, and from which Peter can’t be employed, doesn’t do all that much for Mary, especially over the long term, and in any event is not sustainable.
None of this is even remotely correct.
@Ben Wolf: Tsar, like Doug, should stick to legal analysis.
