{"id":194670,"date":"2008-08-28T19:01:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-29T00:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/08\/28\/economics-update-382\/"},"modified":"2008-08-28T19:01:00","modified_gmt":"2008-08-29T00:01:00","slug":"economics-update-382","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/08\/28\/economics-update-382\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, the big news is that the US GDP rose by an adjusted 3.3% rate in Q2<\/a>. The initial estimate was 1.7%, and the estimate for this, the 2nd cut on GDP numbers was 2.7%.<\/p>\n

Of course, inflation ran at a 4.2% rate, which puts it back into negative territory, though the economists typically use the “core” rate, 2.1%, even though purchasing energy and food is included in the GDP numbers.<\/p>\n

This is reinforced by the weekly unemployment numbers, with new claims down by 10,000 this week<\/a>, but, “continued claims are now above 3.4 million for the first time since 2003.”<\/p>\n

What is going on is that the real estate asset bubble was concealing the fact that productivity from 2000 through 2007, but middle class income fell<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We were working harder for less money, and going into debt because our houses were appreciating.<\/p>\n

Things ain’t great in Europe either, with European retail sales falling<\/a>, though German unemployment fell<\/a>, even while the German economy contracted….I really don’t get that one.<\/p>\n

We do have good news on the monoliner insurers, with MBIA getting a juicy insurance deal<\/a> thanks to the help of the New York State Insurance Superintendent…..Smells like a backdoor bailout to me.<\/p>\n

In the world of home mortgages, it appears that numbers showing a mortgage application increase may be garbage<\/a>, because they do not account for multiple applications from one person, which is what tends to happen when lenders get pickier about issuing loans.<\/p>\n

Finally, oil is down<\/a>, the dollar is up<\/a>, and gas prices are down again<\/a>, more than 45\u00a2 off their peak.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, the big news is that the US GDP rose by an adjusted 3.3% rate in Q2. The initial estimate was 1.7%, and the estimate for this, the 2nd cut on GDP numbers was 2.7%. Of course, inflation ran at a 4.2% rate, which puts it back into negative territory, though the economists typically use …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[973,975,1004,1045,1088,1089],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-194670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy","category-employment","category-finance","category-insurance","category-real-estate","category-recession"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194670"}],"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=194670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194670\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}