June 2020

May PCE up 8.2%, but 2 Months PCE Still Subtracts 29.06 Percentage Points from 2nd Quarter GDP

The May report Personal Income and Outlays from the Bureau of Economic Analysis 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 nearly 70% of GDP, and the PCE price index, 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.

Global oil output surplus was at 8.6 million barrels per day in May, despite OPEC cut of 6.3 million bpd

Wednesday of this past week saw the release of OPEC's June Oil Market Report, which covers OPEC & global oil data for May, and hence it gives us a picture of the global oil supply & demand situation during the first month of the two month agreement between OPEC, the Russians, and other oil producers to cut production by 9.7 million barrels a day from an elevated October 2018 baseline.