While -0.2% sounds like more evidence for the nothing-ever-happens gang, it had increased in both 1Q 2024 and 4Q 2024, marking the start of a downward trend. The last time it went down was in 2022 coming out of COVID.
for sure. it doesn’t seem like a big deal, until one realizes a fundamental underlying premise of US political economy relies on infinite growth.
indeed, a lot of indicators portray not expanding fast enough is a “bad” sign. so no expansion or even shrinkage is basically “it’s fucked” and is supposed to be associated with like historic financial crisis.
Internally my company has been behaving like the next Great Depression is happening.
All companies have been acting that way for a long time, look at the alleged surge in profits and they still lay everyone off left and right and avoid hiring like the plague.
Sure, but specifically we’ve stopped buying laptops and other capital expenditures so we don’t have to lay people off in case things get really bad this fall.
99.8% left to go!
The 3.4% price growth excluding food and energy costs is the real kicker here. Real GDP is down by 3.6%. And this is still with the full effects of the Q1 tariffs not fully baked in (since businesses frontloaded inventories).
While recent reports have pointed toward tamer inflation, Fed officials are still wary of price pressures rearing back up again, and, combined with heightened uncertainty, are keeping interest rates on hold for now.
As the article says at the end, the fed is still not really looking to lower interest rates. Combine this with climbing unemployment, the US is looking to enter soft stagflation basically.
In separate data, continuing jobless claims, a proxy for the number of people receiving unemployment benefits, rose to the highest level since November 2021. Initial claims also increased, according to Labor Department figures released Thursday.
Well actually it’s been in stagflation for a while already. But so far the economic statistics could be papered up.
Arguably we’ve been in stagflation since 2008.
We keep hearing about how massive the California economy is, but how much of that is just the rise in property values and its reported that the real estate “industry” there is the “best” in the world?
That, plus VC pump-and-dumps and tech industry speculation leading to multi-billion dollar valuations for shit like Farmville.
I’m frankly amazed how far they managed to kick the can down the road since the pandemic. It does look like chickens are coming home to roost now though, and it’s no longer going to be possible to spin this as anything other than an economic crash.
Bad news in a global scale. As a cyclic center for global economy, the last policies of Trump government can have devastating effects in the rest of the world, and not just because of the tariffs, but because of the impact that this can have in the US economy as a whole.
It’s predominantly going to affect countries that are reliant on trade with US. For example, I doubt Russia, Iran, or DPRK are going to care all that much. The most likely result of all this will be that there’s going to be more focus on trade with BRICS and decoupling from the west by the Global South.
