{"id":188767,"date":"2010-08-01T21:03:00","date_gmt":"2010-08-02T02:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/08\/01\/economics-data-points-for-last-week\/"},"modified":"2010-08-01T21:03:00","modified_gmt":"2010-08-02T02:03:00","slug":"economics-data-points-for-last-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/08\/01\/economics-data-points-for-last-week\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics Data Points for Last Week"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/business\/la-fi-economy-gdp-20100731,0,6482212.story\">GDP growth has fallen sharply<\/a>, down to a 2.4% annual rate in the 2<sup>nd<\/sup> quarter, as compared to the anemic-for-a-meaningful-recovery 3.7% in the 1<sup>st<\/sup> quarter, which appears to indicate that the recovery is running out of steam.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s more, the base number is overly rosy to begin with, since it is driven by <a href=\"http:\/\/voices.washingtonpost.com\/political-economy\/2010\/07\/the_closer_you_look_at_the_gdp.html\">inventory restocking from industries that had drawn down to the bone, home builders rushing to beat the tax credit deadline, and a significant increase in government spending<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Consumer spending rose by only a 1.6% annual rate.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s more, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/2010-07-29\/unemployment-claims-in-u-s-decreased-11-000-last-week-to-457-000.html\">initial unemployment claims remained above 450,000<\/a>, at least 50K above a tepid recovery in employment.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m beginning to agree with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/apps\/news?pid=newsarchive&amp;sid=aIQSkFg5czbg\">Mohamed  El-Erian of PIMCO, who says that employment has become a leading indicator, since it drives consumer spending<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So, GDP growth has fallen sharply, down to a 2.4% annual rate in the 2nd quarter, as compared to the anemic-for-a-meaningful-recovery 3.7% in the 1st quarter, which appears to indicate that the recovery is running out of steam. What&#8217;s more, the base number is overly rosy to begin with, since it is driven by inventory &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[973,975,1089,992],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy","category-employment","category-recession","category-statistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188767"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188767\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}