Showing posts with label Commerce Department. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Commerce Department. Show all posts

Sunday, June 1, 2014

By John Ransom, May 31, 2014, Townhall.com

Medical research has indicated that people like schizophrenics, or people suffering from mania, cannot distinguish between voices outside of themselves and the self-talk that goes inside their head. It’s just a simple biologic matter of that particular brain not being able to make that distinction.

Democrats have that same problem.

And here’s why: the only voices that are truly outside Democrats’ heads are voices from the opposition that they pay no attention to.

Criticism to Democrats is like a dog whistle. They just can’t hear that frequency.

The media, the bureaucracy, the economists, the government funded nongovernmental organizations and academia all speak inside the Democrat brain. And Democrats can’t distinguish this internal self-talk from legitimate outside praise.

So like people who suffer from delusions, it’s just a simple matter of Democrats not being able to make the distinction between self-talk and reality.

Yesterday on Ransom Notes Radio we ran a clip of Mike McKee, the eternal optimist for Bloomberg (media), talking about how the numbers indicated that we could be looking at 4% annual growth in GDP this quarter.

Of course I made fun of him, and today it's hard for me to see how recent consumer spending numbers would be consistent with that type of robust GDP growth. We have yet to see sustained economic growth under the Obama administration, or the Carter administration for that matter.

For the second day in a row the Commerce Department released numbers that caught economist off guard and demonstrated once again that all the "happy talk" about the economy is premature. In April consumer expenditures fell rather than rose, as economist widely expected. From Bloomberg:

Household purchases, which account for about 70 percent of the economy, dropped 0.1 percent, the first decrease in a year, after a revised 1 percent gain the prior month that was the strongest reading since August 2009, Commerce Department figures showed today in Washington. The median forecast of 77 economists in a Bloomberg survey called for a 0.2 percent April rise. Incomes advanced 0.3 percent after climbing 0.5 percent.

And since they can't blame the weather in April, what's the rationale to explain how they missed the decline in consumer spending? They blame the weather of course-- again.

Economists are saying the pent-up demand in March--because of the terrible winter weather prior to that-- skewed the numbers upward, and that in April we are just coming back to a more realistic spending pattern.

“A lot of pent-up activity took place in March and now we’re coming back to more normal levels of spending,” said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Pierpont Securities LLC in Stamford, Connecticut. Stanley was one of economists who correctly predicted the decline. “The risk at this point is that the consumer is falling back into a pattern of mediocre spending growth.”

Read the full story:  
www.finance.townhall.com

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Wednesday, April 30, 2014

By Breitbart.com, Apr. 30, 2014

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. economy slowed sharply in the first three months of the year as a harsh winter exacted a toll on business activity. The slowdown, while worse than expected, is likely to be temporary as growth rebounds with warmer weather.

Growth slowed to a barely discernible 0.1 percent annual rate in the January-March quarter, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. That was the weakest pace since the end of 2012 and was down from a 2.6 percent rate in the previous quarter.

Many economists said the government's first estimate of growth in the January-March quarter was skewed by weak figures early in the quarter. They noted that several sectors — from retail sales to manufacturing output — rebounded in March. That strength should provide momentum for the rest of the year.

And on Friday, economists expect the government to report a solid 200,000-plus job gain for April.

"While quarter one was weak, many measures of sentiment and output improved in March and April, suggesting that the quarter ended better than it began," said Dan Greenhaus, chief investment strategist at global financial services firm BTIG.

Still, the anemic growth last quarter is surely a topic for discussion at the Federal Reserve's latest policy meeting, which ends Wednesday afternoon.

In its report, the government said consumer spending grew at a 3 percent annual rate last quarter. But that gain was dominated by a 4.4 percent rise in spending on services, reflecting higher utility bills and an expansion in health care spending from provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Spending on goods barely rose. Also dampening growth were a drop in business investment, a rise in the trade deficit and a fall in housing construction.

The scant 0.1 percent growth rate in the gross domestic product, the country's total output of goods and services, was well below the 1.1 percent rise economists had predicted. The last time a quarterly growth rate was so slow was in the final three months of 2012, when it was also 0.1 percent.

Read the full story:  www.breitbart.com


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