The Advance Estimate of 2nd Quarter GDP from the Bureau of Economic Analysis released on Friday included an annual revision to the past 3 years of GDP releases, revising previously published data from the first quarter of 2014 through the first quarter of 2017, which on net indicated that US economic growth over the period from 2014 to 2016 was at a 2.3% annual rate, revised from the 2.2% composite annual growth previously published for that period
Because I try to keep up with the ongoing RussiaGate ruse, I follow on Twitter many of the major peddlers of this nonsense. Many of them casually toss around accusations of disloyalty by Trump and his supporters and, as I noted in my last article, even treason. They frequently invoke country, the flag, the Constitution, etc. and suggest that Trump cares nothing about any of these and is instead a pawn of Vladimir Putin. Of course this is all absurd on its face.
The Twitterverse and the rest of social media are abuzz with hysteria about Russia in light of the recent revelations regarding Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian national who claimed to be in possession of some incriminating information about Hillary Clinton. Words frequently used by the anti-Trump Russian conspiracy mongers to describe Russia include “enemy,” “hostile,” “adversary,” etc. There is just one problem with this. It is not an accurate characterization of Russia or our relationship with her.
For 66 years the Glass-Steagall act reduced the risks in the banking system. Eight years after the act was repealed, the banking system blew up threatening the international economy. US taxpayers were forced to come up with $750 billion dollars, a sum much larger than the Pentagon’s budget, in order to bail out the banks. This huge sum was insufficient to do the job. The Federal Reserve had to step in and expand its balance sheet by $4 trillion in order to protect the solvency of banks declared “too big to fail.”
The May report on Personal Income and Outlays, released on Friday, gives us nearly half the data that will go into 2nd quarter GDP, since it gives us 2 months of data on our personal consumption expenditures (PCE), which accounts for more than 69% of GDP, and the PCE price index, the inflation gauge the Fed targets, and which is used to adjust that personal spending data for inflation to give us the relative change in the output of goods and services that our spending indicated.
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