Free Republic

The U.S. economy contracted in the first three months of 2025, as businesses rushed to stock up on imports ahead of tariffs and consumers eased their pace of spending. The Commerce Department said U.S. gross domestic product—the value of all goods and services produced across the economy—fell at a seasonally and inflation adjusted 0.3% annual rate in the first quarter. That was the steepest decline since the first quarter of 2022. The reading fell short of the 0.4% growth that economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal expected. The decline in GDP in the first quarter reflected front-running ahead of...

The U.S. economy shrank in the first quarter despite underlying strength in consumer and business spending. Gross domestic product contracted at an annualized rate of 0.3 percent, the Department of Commerce said on Wednesday. The decline in U.S. gross domestic product marks a sharp reversal from the 2.4 percent growth rate recorded at the end of last year. This was the lowest rate of growth since 2022, when the economy avoided an official recession but contracted for two consecutive quarters. Final sales to private domestic purchasers, a closely watched measure of business and consumer health, expanded at a healthy pace...

Wow, that was quick. The Washington Post has already taken to blaming President Donald Trump for America’s economic woes, except the new data they’re using as the basis of their argument reflected the disastrous Biden economy, not Trump’s. GDP growth slowed in the fourth quarter of 2024 to 2.3 percent, which was noticeably slower than expected and put a dent into a lot of the media brouhaha surrounding how turbo-tastic Bidenomics supposedly was. But Post economic reporter Abha Bhattarai, desperate to spin this as somehow Trump’s fault, blamed the quirk on the economy getting the heebie-jeebies over his policies, before...

Total global debt has peaked to 326% of global GDP, adding an additional $12 trillion of debt in the last three quarters of 2024, according to the Institute of International Finance. This figure surpasses what we saw amid the pandemic and is expected to continually rise and governments continue to borrow with no intention of repayment. The Big Bang of the sovereign debt crisis began in 2015.75, as indicated by the computers, around the introduction of negative rates and Quantitative Easing, which shifted the risk from the free market to the central banks. The 2015.75 date was also 26 years...

Beyond providing supplemental income for Mexican households, remittances—funds sent by migrants to friends and families in their home country—provide a stable flow of developmental finance to the poorest subregions of the country, which have not historically benefited from international capital flows, such as development aid or foreign direct investment. Mexico, the world’s second-largest recipient of remittances, has seen a steady increase in the total volume of remittances received, primarily due to the strength of the U.S. labor market and concurrent wage growth among Mexican workers in the United States. Mechanisms to keep remittances secure are not impermeable to criminal organizations,...

The U.S. economy posted another solid though slightly disappointing period of growth in the third quarter, propelled higher by strong consumer spending that has defied expectations for a slowdown. Gross domestic product, a measure of all the goods and services produced during the three-month period from July through September, increased at a 2.8% annualized rate. The report confirms that the U.S. expansion has continued despite elevated interest rates and long-standing worries that the burst of fiscal and monetary stimulus that carried the economy through the Covid crisis wouldn’t be enough to sustain growth. However, resilient consumer spending, which accounts for...

The presidential campaign season is once again turning politicians into pandering game show hosts, promising voters huge tax cuts and spending expansions with no regard to the debt crisis these policies will accelerate. Budget deficits are set to exceed $2 trillion this year — despite relative peace and prosperity — and then surge to $4 trillion within a decade under current policies. For the first time since the end of World War II, the federal debt will top 100% of the gross domestic product. The impending completion of the Biden-Harris administration brings an opportunity to assess their role in these...

The UK's public sector debt has hit 100% of the value of the country's annual economic output for the first time since the 1960s, according to official figures released ahead of the chancellor's maiden budget. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said, in a preliminary estimate, that the figure had risen from the 99.3% figure recorded the previous month. Wider data revealed by the number crunchers showed that the government borrowed £13.7bn in August, up by £2bn on the figure expected by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).

Nvidia Corp.’s meteoric rise makes it not only the third-largest company in the U.S. in terms of market capitalization, but also bigger than most other countries’ economies, based on gross domestic product. The chip maker’s stock closed at $788.17 on Friday, giving it a market value of $1.97 trillion. That figure is greater than the GDP of every nation in the world but 11, beating the likes of Russia, South Korea and Australia, according to February International Monetary Fund data compiled by Forbes. Of course, comparing a single stock’s market cap to a country’s GDP is not a perfect exercise,...

During an interview aired on Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Your World,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stated that the current interest burden of the national debt is at a “normal” level, but President Joe Biden wants to cut the deficit “and doing that would be compatible with making investments in the economy that are necessary to support its growth. But we’re going to have to let important pieces of the Tax Cut[s] and Job[s] Act expire.” Yellen said, “Well, the debt — the ratio of debt to GDP — we have a very large economy, and the ratio...

Boom boom! ATL Fed Nowcast plunges to 1.8% as their consumer spending estimate collapses – less than 3 weeks ago, they were forecasting 4.2% growth for Q2; a recession likely began in April. The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the second quarter of 2024 is 1.8 percent on June 3, down from 2.7 percent on May 31. After recent releases from the US Census Bureau and the Institute for Supply Management, the nowcasts for annualized second-quarter real personal consumption expenditures growth and real private fixed investment growth declined from 2.6 percent and 3.1...

The U.S. economy grew less than previously thought in the first three months of the year, expanding at an annual pace of just 1.3 percent, revised government data showed Thursday. The downward revision was primarily driven by data showing that consumer spending grew by significantly less than previously estimated. This was the smallest expansion in gross domestic product in almost two years. The prior estimate had the economy growing at a 1.6 percent pace in the first quarter. Consumer spending grew an an annualized pace of two percent in the first quarter, the new figures show, down from the previous...

For the better part of two decades, a small group of us fiscally prudent types have been relegated to the wilderness for having the temerity to sound the alarm. Our warnings were bordering on heresy to many on Wall Street and in DC. But lately, more and more voices are joining the chorus that we are heading headlong toward a fiscal and monetary cliff. When the day of reckoning arrives, most people will be unprepared. That is a fact that has been proven throughout history. Just as fortune favours the prepared, financial ruin will befall the unprepared. Before you roll...

What I like about Biden’s economy … nothing. Most of Biden’s economic growth came from Trump’s spending and Fed monetary policy from the Covid shutdown of 2020. What was until recently a “red-hot” economy, with the US reportedly growing at an annual rate of 4.9% in Q3 and 3.4% in Q4 2024, has suddenly and dramatically downshifted, and according to the latest GDP data released from Biden’s BEA, Q1 GDP was revised downward from 1.6% to just 1.3% (1.250% to be specific), which was the lowest GDP since the mini-recession of Q2 when GDP declined for 2 quarters in a...

Slower growth and rising inflation has brought back distant cries that stagflation is coming. This would force interest rates to stay higher for longer, putting pressure on US businesses and consumers. One investor says anyone looking to hedge this risk should focus on fixed income. A pair of economic reports has brought back a word no central banker ever wants to hear: stagflation. The difficult scenario occurs when inflation rises and growth stalls, a dangerous combination just experienced by the US economy. Worries emerged when Thursday's first-quarter GDP reading slumped against expectations, growing at an annualized 1.6% rate. That's a...

On Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Cavuto: Coast to Coast,” White House Council of Economic Advisers Chair Jared Bernstein stated that the White House is okay with the latest GDP report, “especially once you get under the hood, you take out some of those more volatile components, consumer spending and investment look great.” And “the underlying economy is solid as ever.” Guest host Edward Lawrence asked, “When you dig into this GDP report…you find that the first quarter personal consumption grew at 2.5%, the non-defense government spending grew at 0.3%, but if you look back to the fourth...

On Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Cavuto: Coast to Coast,” White House Council of Economic Advisers Chair Jared Bernstein stated that even with the latest GDP report, we “really haven’t seen much in terms of slow growth yet.” And the job market is “really what matters to people, you don’t eat GDP, your paycheck matters most.” Bernstein said, “We really haven’t seen much in terms of slow growth yet. Let’s talk about the job market, because that’s really what matters to people, you don’t eat GDP, your paycheck matters most. And there, you’ve seen growth continuing to defy...

U.S. economic growth was much weaker than expected to start the year, and prices rose at a faster pace, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. Gross domestic product, a broad measure of goods and services produced in the January-through-March period, increased at a 1.6% annualized pace when adjusted for seasonality and inflation, according to the department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for an increase of 2.4% following a 3.4% gain in the fourth quarter of 2023 and 4.9% in the previous period. Consumer spending increased 2.5% in the period, down from a 3.3% gain...

The US economy grew at a slower pace than expected in the first quarter. The Bureau of Economic Analysis's advance estimate of first quarter US gross domestic product (GDP) showed the economy grew at an annualized pace of 1.6% during the period. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg estimated the US economy grew at an annualized pace of 2.5% during the period. The reading came in significantly lower than fourth quarter GDP, which was revised up to 3.4%. The softer-than expected print is a sign that the Federal Reserve's historic interest rate hikes are putting pressure on consumers and the economy. Investors...

That’s Bidenomics for you! The Conference Board’s Leading Economic Indicators (LEI) continued its decline in January, dropping 0.4% MoM (notably worse than the -0.1% MoM expectations), and December’s 0.1% declin e was revised down to a 0.2% decline. The biggest positive contributor to the leading index was stock prices (again) at +0.10 The biggest negative contributor was average workweek at -0.18 This is the 22nd straight MoM decline in the LEI (and 23rd month of 25) – equaling the longest streak of declines since ‘Lehman’ (22 straight months of declines from June 2007 to April 2008) “The U.S. LEI fell...