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The United States recorded a Government Debt to GDP has risen dramatically and remains at peak levels since Obama took office. See chart in linked article. We have been running at roughly just over DOUBLE the GDP in debt.

Paulina Abramovich, AFP December 2, 2014Santiago (AFP) - Latin America's economies, hit by falling investment, will grow just 1.1 percent in 2014 -- their lowest level in five years, a UN commission on the region said Tuesday. The poor performance of several of Latin America's biggest economies dragged down growth across the region, found the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). Argentina's economy will contract by 0.2 percent this year and Venezuela's by 3.0 percent, it said. Regional giant Brazil's will grow just 0.2 percent. The figures are the latest confirmation of the end of...

Here's a map from American Enterprise Institute's Mark Perry that puts America's $16 trillion economy in some global perspective. The map compares the GDP of U.S. states with other the national GDPs of other nations.

Sam Ro October 17, 2014The spread of the Ebola virus has been dominating headlines in recent weeks. While the ultimate death toll may be limited, the economic impact could potentially be significant. The "'fear factor' associated with Ebola appears more significant than in past instances of pandemic concern, in our view," Goldman Sachs' Kris Dawsey writes. Dawsey studied how other recent pandemic events ultimately played out in the US and Hong Kong. "Recent episodes of pandemic concern in the US — including SARS in 2003, bird flu (H5N1) in 2005, and swine flu (H1N1) in 2009 — resulted in little...

Tomas Hirst September 30, 2014The hot debate in financial circles at the moment is exactly when the Fed (and/or the Bank of England) will start raising rates as the economic recovery picks up steam. However, the authors of the Geneva Report suggest talk of the crisis being over is seriously premature. Six years on from the financial crisis, people were expecting a global economy less reliant on debt financing and gradually moving back toward trend growth. According to Luigi Buttiglione, Philip Lane, Lucrezia Reichlin, and Vincent Reinhart, we instead have global debt-to-GDP breaking new highs and a permanent decline in...

The previous estimates of economic growth in the second quarter turned out to be a shade too modest. The final estimate of second-quarter growth from the Bureau of Economic Analysis puts the annualized GDP increase at 4.6%, the best quarter in more than two years, and a sharp rebound from Q1′s -2.1%: 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 4.6 percent in the second quarter of 2014, according to the “third” estimate released by the Bureau of Economic...

Spain’s National Statistics Institute says money generated by drug trafficking, prostitution, smuggling and illegal gambling contributed some €9 billion ($11.4 billion) to the national economy last year. […] The figures are being included in GDP calculations on the recommendation of the European Union, which is trying to harmonize estimates across member states and get a full picture of economic activity, whether legal or not. …

<p>It's no secret. California is expensive. But is it a little more nuanced than that; coastal California is very expensive while inland California is just moderately expensive. Yet, despite being a well-known fact, Sacramento doesn't appear too concerned with California's growing price tag even though there is evidence it could be slowing the Golden State's economic growth.</p>

On Thursday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released its second estimate of real gross domestic product for the second quarter of 2014 — covering April, May and June of this year. The release showed output in the U.S. increasing at an annual rate of 4.2%. This is relative to the first quarter when real GDP declined a sharp 2.1%. The revision is up marginally from BEA’s 4% advance estimate released last month. The revision, BEA said in a release, was largely due to a larger than previously estimated increase in nonresidential fixed investment. However, the increase in private inventory investment...

The Congressional Budget Office released a bit of a good news/bad news report on Wednesday regarding the state of the U.S. economy and federal budget. In the bad news column, CBO projected 2014’s GDP growth at just 1.5 percent. The report blamed this revision on “the surprising economic weakness in the first half of the year.” In early June, the International Monetary Fund projected the United States to grow by just 2 percent this year, revising its own estimate down from a previously anticipated 2.7 percent GDP expansion. This report is not likely to be warmly greeted by the...

The Congressional Budget Office on Wednesday raised its estimate of the federal government’s budget deficit for the current fiscal year as it slashed its growth forecast, and warned red ink was due to rise in coming years if Washington doesn’t change current laws. In an update of budget and economic projections for 2014 to 2024, the nonpartisan CBO said the U.S. government’s deficit for fiscal 2014 will be $506 billion, or 2.9% of gross domestic product. The new estimate is $14 billion more than the agency’s prior estimate for the year, issued in April. The agency lowered its projection of...

Japan's GDP Shrinks 6.8% As Sales Tax Bites A sales tax rise takes its toll on spending by consumers and businesses but the painful effects are expected to be temporary. Efforts to shore up Japan's public finances have had a negative impact on its economy, with GDP shrinking 1.7% in the second quarter alone. A sales tax increase from 5% to 8%, which came into force in April, was blamed for the contraction in output during the period which came in at at annualised rate of 6.8%. The decline in GDP was the worst since the economic tailspin that followed...

While the media basks in the artificial light of a 4 percent GDP print for the second quarter, jobs continue to disappoint—and so does GDP. You wouldn’t know it, however,r by the way the media covers the economy. “The high-flying labor market showed no let-up in July,” writes USAToday, “as employers added 209,000 jobs.” Of course economists expected a bigger gain of 238,000 jobs, but you know: Who’s counting? Numbers and math are so overrated. We have gotten to the point that a missed estimate of 30,000 jobs is no big deal, while an uptick in unemployment is good...

The United States economy rebounded heartily in the spring after a dismal winter, the Commerce Department reported on Wednesday, growing at an annual rate of 4 percent from April through June and surpassing economists’ expecations.

The Commerce Department had some good news about the U.S. economy today: Rebounding from a quarter of negative growth, Commerce said the country's gross domestic product expanded at a 4 percent annual rate during the second quarter."The increase in real GDP in the second quarter primarily reflected positive contributions from personal consumption expenditures (PCE), private inventory investment, exports, nonresidential fixed investment, state and local government spending, and residential fixed investment," Commerce said in a statement.As The Wall Street Journal sees it, the positive news is fueling hopes "for sustained growth in the second half of 2014." The paper adds: "The...

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....