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Just skip to the chart: Highlights Personal income rose a moderate 0.3 percent in December with the wages & salaries component posting a slightly better gain at 0.4 percent. The savings rate, however, fell in the month, down 2 tenths to 5.4 percent which helped to fund a strong 0.5 percent gain in consumer spending. December’s spending was centered in a 1.4 percent rise for durable goods, boosted specifically by autos, but included a 0.4 percent gain for services and a...

To cite myself: Tags: lawsuits, mixed nuts Comments (2) | Digg Facebook Twitter |...

from Peter Radford We are, no doubt, about to be barraged by a torrent of alternative facts concerning the economy and economic growth under our new leader. So let’s get a few facts on the table in order to set a base level for future reference. Let’s start with growth during the past six presidencies: So, no, Obama was not the disaster Trump and the Republicans are trying to paint him as. The economy during Obama’s term outperformed that of his predecessor. This includes the enormous...

from David Ruccio Now that President Trump has begun carrying out his campaign pledges to undo America’s trade ties, formally withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and announcing he will start to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, it’s time to analyze what this means. As it turns out, I’d already started to do this before the election, with a series of posts (e.g., here, here, here, and here) on Trump and the mounting criticism of the trade...

from Dean Baker As we start the Trump presidency, events just keep getting more bizarre. At his first and last press conference as president-elect, Donald Trump boasted about his divestment plan in which he was “sort of, kind of” turning over the management of his business enterprises to his two adult sons. He displayed a table full of documents that were supposed to indicate the extent of his divestment, but the documents were not made available for the press to examine. Furthermore, in...

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Why, oh why is there not an effective opposition party in the U.S. Congress? The last time “voter fraud” was as high on the GOP’s agenda as it now is on Trump’s, it led to the politically-motivated firing of nine U.S. Attorneys, which caused a scandal that resulted in the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. During the Congressional investigation into the firings, it was revealed that millions of emails were missing, some of which were germane to the...

Yes, he said it. One of the gems found by Erwan Mahé in the minutes of the FOMC meetings. Ben Bernanke: “Here we potentially have a comparison to Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace and the Versailles treaty, where he pointed out that forcing Germany into extreme austerity, although it might satisfy certain moral, ethical, or political urges, had macroeconomic consequences that might force Germany eventually to rebel. By the same token, if there’s not growth for the South,...

And without the undesired inventory build due to lower sales, it would have only been up .9% for q4, and .25% lower year over year. Personal Consumption (which includes health insurance premiums) has gone from +q2;s 4.3 to q3’s +3.0 to q4’s +2.5 and we’ve kicked off the new year with a big drop in vehicle sales and a big drop in housing starts, etc: Highlights A perhaps unwanted build in inventories drove up fourth-quarter GDP which, however, could only manage 1.9 percent...

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