2.6 is still a good quarter. Beats most of Obama’s quarters with 0.3, 0.5, and 1.4 being a good first or last quarter for his term. Though it is concerning that we now get excited of anything over 2.0 when a couple decades ago we regularly hit 4.5-5.0 or more.
One more thing that concerns is the fact that Europe and China are slowing down. China is goosing it’s numbers, but I don’t hardly believe them. They can’t keep doing it as debt is going over 350% soon. If Europe goes down it will ding our exports because they buy much more from us than China does...last year the U.S. exported $500 billion to Europe while we exported $130 billion to China. This could ding our GDP # by a substantial margin, thus slowing everything else down too.
It’s just a shame that we got stuck with 8 years of Obama’s policies and sluggishness and we only got Trump at the tail end of a 10 year “recovery.” We may have run out of tarmac before the business cycle goes down again. That’s my biggest concern. Now I understand why all economists worry constantly.
The massive trade deficit is responsible for the decline in gdp. I believe I’ve read that in our time we would be >1% higher in gdp if we made the trade deficit reasonable. Not only does it have a negative outflow, but it costs jobs.
If we could halfway fix it, we would improve. How? The market is elastic. Buy those same goods from other Asian & developing countries with whom we do have a sane trade deal. To force that along, put big tariffs on China.