Posted on 01/30/2020 7:04:53 AM PST by John W
The numbers: The U.S. economy grew slightly faster than 2% in the final three months of 2019, aided by a temporary plunge in imports and a resurgent housing market. The modest rate of growth likely foreshadows what lies ahead.
Gross domestic product, the official scorecard for the economy, expanded at a 2.1% clip in the fourth quarter. Analysts polled by MarketWatch had forecast a 1.9% increase.
(Excerpt) Read more at apple.news ...
Gee, I wonder how in heck that happened?..................Weird, huh?..................
One must Remember that EVERY economic report under Obama was revised downward while EVERY economic report under POTUS has been revised UPWARD!
Weird, what is weirder is the article did not begin with the word: Unexpectedly
Total growth for CY 2019 was 2.3%, with CNBC calling it the “slowest growth in three years.”
How does this work? If you have a booming economy the year before and the economy is still booming and firing on all cylinders but only have little more growth the next year. Isn’t this better than having a lousy first year and a little more growth in the second year?
It seems to be me that it would be harder to grow a booming economy than a lousy.
Let’s not kid ourselves. This isn’t great news. It’s growth but not what we’d like to see
“ Let’s not kid ourselves. This isn’t great news. It’s growth but not what we’d like to see”
Let’s see what happened from the beginning of Q4.
Fears of a global slowdown, now getting better,
China trade war, now better.
No USMCA, now better.
Going forward...Coronaviris. Not as bad as those 3, hopefully. 2.1 all said and done....not bad.
Demographics.
https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/springsummer-2018/demographics-their-implications-economy-policy
Reversion to the mean.
What? Tariffs on countries with unfair tariffs on us don’t work. I remember hearing that somewhere.
1.62% per capita growth rate. Not stellar. Rather surprised economy isn’t humming stronger than this.
I like perspective so its more valuable to have GDP growth balanced for population growth. So I though I would compare Canada. Canada has seen 1 percent population growth vs about 0.5% in the USA. Rather surprised and must be accounted for by immigration. That puts Canada at 1.6 minus 1.00 for 0.60% per capita gdp growth in 2019. The US outpaces at 1.62%.
Tariffs need to be raised much higher.
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