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Moments ago the Commerce department reported Q2 GDP which blew estimates out of the water, printing at 4.0%, above the declining 3.0% consensus, as a result of a surge in Inventories and Fixed Investment, both of which added over 2.5% of the total print, while exports added another 1.23% to the GDP number. The full breakdown by component is shown below. What is interesting is that the Commerce Department announced that as a result of incomplete June data, the biggest components of the GDP beat, Inventories and Trade, were estimated. In other words, assume that future revisions of Q2 GDP...

Finally, the change in net worth has made the mainstream media. The statistics, as reported in the NY Times, are horrific, as are the implications for the future of the country. Net worth may be the best single measure of a country's well-being. Median net worth is a reasonable marker for the standard of living. Medians (or averages) are not good measures to capture what is happening at the lowest or highest ends. (More about that below.) In the simplest terms, net worth is the value of a person's assets minus his liabilities. If this measure is growing, a person...

This is what happens when a priced to perfection global economy (and well beyond perfection based on the S&P 500) runs into the utterly and completely unpredictable and unforseeable "harsh winter weather."First, the IMF just cut (again) its forecast for US GDP, this time from 2.0% to the consensus-estimate 1.7%. The IMF cited the 1Q contraction, which from a +3% original estimate ended up being that, just with a minus sign. It also says second-half growth to accelerate... because it must! Some other brilliant points from the IMF:IMF staff: U.S. to reach full employment “only by end-2017”“The economy is...

The first quarter contraction, especially our corrected number, implies a second quarter negative real GDP. In other words, the years of Quantitative Easing (money printing) by the Federal Reserve has not resulted in economic recovery from the 2008 downturn and has not prevented further contraction.

While the Bureau of Labor Statistics' jobs report this week contained mostly good news, our economic statistics have been shaky over the past few months. A major downward revision to economic gowth has a report showing that the economy contracted by almost 3% last quarter. It's possible that Obamacare is holding back the economy. Jared Meyer, policy analyst at Economics 21, wrote about how Obamacare's hurting economic growth: The Employer Mandate. The Act originally required businesses with over 49 full-time equivalent employees to offer insurance that met government requirements by January 1, 2014, but President Obama has delayed the mandate....

Why do bad things always happen to him? Last week, the establishment press largely shrugged off the awful and ominous news that the economy shrank at an annual rate of 2.9 percent [1] during this year’s first quarter. When they deigned to notice it, they usually told their readers, listeners and viewers that happy days have now returned.Unfortunately, the reported contraction is historically foreboding: The 5.5-point downward swing from the fourth quarter’s 2.6 percent annualized growth to the first quarter’s 2.9 percent contraction was the largest such move from expansion to decline since the fourth quarter of 1981 [2].Since...

Do you know why the U.S. economy shrank almost 3 percent in the first quarter of this year? When the news of the dreadful gross domestic product (GDP) number came out last week, many were surprised, but none were more surprised than the folks in the Obama administration. Many of their supporters had been saying this was the year of a real economic recovery. The quick reaction was to blame the bad GDP numbers on the weather, and it is true that much of the country did have record cold temperatures, but in all likelihood the weather was only a...

In the first quarter of 2014, GDP shrunk 2.9 percent and most of the reason is because health-care spending declined. That doesn’t mean we’re in for a recession though. Obamacare did help crash the economy. Only not in the way its critics thought it would. The Commerce Department on Wednesday revised the growth figures for the first quarter of 2014, and concluded that the economy shrunk at a 2.9 percent annual rate. This comes a month after the government slashed its initial estimate from an annual growth rate of .1 percent to a decline of 1.0 percent. At the time,...

This country is a bunch of lions led by donkeys, as the Germans said about the English Army in the first war. The latest Obama-related bray is the revised GDP numbers for the first quarter. Economists expected the economy to grow by 1.9% even after a discount for the cold weather. Instead the initial estimate saw a contraction of 1%. As we approached the revision to the initial estimate, we began hearing that perhaps things would be even worse in the next estimate. They were. The revision came in at a contraction of 2.9% for the first quarter. But...

For months the administration, financial pundits and Wall Street analysts made it a point to inform Americans about the healthy state of our economy. One of the key metrics they’ve used as proof of recovery was the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which measures the productive output of the U.S. economy as a whole. Earlier this year the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis noted that this measure was showing positive growth. But now, after a second official revision, all of that purported growth used to goad consumers into spending more money on homes, cars and other goods has been revealed to...

The US GDP fell at an annual rate of 2.9 percent in the first quarter, its slowest rate of growth since 2009, in the middle of the recession. And yet no one seems to mind. Stock markets didn't plummet, and no one is forecasting yet another recession. A shrinking GDP is never great news, of course, but here are a few reasons why economists and markets are shaking off the biggest economic contraction in more than five years.

The US economy shrunk at a much larger rate than previously estimated in the first quarter.The GDP fell by 2.9%, the economy’s worst performance since the Great Recession. (Trading Economics)But it wasn’t that long ago that the White HOuse bragged that Obamacare saved the first quarter GDP from shrinking. The NRCC reported: By now many of you have seen the news that our GDP declined steeply in the 1st quarter.A drop of 2.9 percent is the type of precipitous fall we haven’t seen since the first months of 2009.But it was less than 2 months ago that the White House...

The U.S. economy contracted at a much steeper pace than previously estimated in the first quarter, but there are indications that growth has since rebounded strongly. The Commerce Department said on Wednesday gross domestic product fell at a 2.9 percent annual rate, the economy's worst performance in five years, instead of the 1.0 percent pace it had reported last month. While the economy's woes have been largely blamed on an unusually cold winter, the magnitude of the revisions suggest other factors at play beyond the weather. Growth has now been revised down by a total of 3.0 percentage points since...

Now that the third revision to gross domestic product is in, we can make a back-of-the-envelope calculation of just how much the unusually cold winter cost the U.S. economy. But obviously, the contraction wasn’t all weather. So, how much? MarketWatch put that question to Gus Faucher-Wanker, senior economist at PNC. “My sense is that, in terms of contraction, more than half was due to the weather. I don’t think it had much of an impact on trade, didn’t have much to do with government, but I do think [the weather impacted] the weaker consumer spending, the drag from inventories, and...

The U.S. economy shrank at a steep annual rate of 2.9 percent in the January-March quarter as a harsh winter contributed to the biggest contraction since the depths of the recession five years ago.

Hooray! The Gross Domestic Product shrank by 2.9% in the first quarter of the year. "This recovery is underway." Your humble correspondent was very careful to put the previous sentence in quotes because I don't want you to think I've taken leave of my senses. This amazing conclusion comes to us courtesy of CNN Money spinmeister Annalyn Kurtz who starts out on a rather gloomy note but manages to spin her way into economic joy:

YIKES! We just got the third revision to Q1 GDP, and it was horrible. After an initial estimate showing a mere 0.1% gain in growth in the first quarter, the government now says the economy shrunk at a staggering 2.9% pace, making it the worst quarter Q1 2009, at the pit of the financial crisis. So should you worry? Absolutely not.

Remember back in April, when the first GDP estimate was released (a gargantuan by comparison 0.1% hence revised to a depression equivalent -2.9%), we wrote: "If It Wasn't For Obamacare, Q1 GDP Would Be Negative." Well, now that GDP is not only negative, but the worst it has been in five years, we are once again proven right. But not only because GDP was indeed negative, but because the real reason for today's epic collapse in GDP was, you guessed it, Obamacare.Here is the chart we posted in April, showing the contribution of Obamacare, aka Healthcare Services spending. It...

The latest data shows the U.S. economy contracted significantly more than previously estimate in the first quarter of this year.On Wednesday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released its third and final estimate of real gross domestic product for the first three months of 2014. The release showed output in the U.S. declining at an annual rate of 2.9%. This is relative to fourth quarter 2013, when real GDP grew 2.6%.The final number is also down from BEA’s negative 1% second estimate released last month, and even more sharply from its first estimate that showed GDP growing 0.1%. While this makes Q1 was...

The United States is considering airstrikes against Islamic rebels with our newest ally, um, Iran. from Reuters: Joint action between the United States and Iran to help prop up the government of their mutual ally would be unprecedented since Iran's 1979 revolution, demonstrating the urgency of the alarm raised by the lightning insurgent advance. As a courtesy to those readers who don't speak Obama, let me provide a translation: "We've screwed up so badly that we have to have enemies like Russia, China, and Iran bail us out in foreign policy and war, over and over and over again." This...