America's Economic Future – A Discussion By Ted Kavadas
The following chart is from the CalculatedRisk Blog of June 10, 2010. It depicts Total Household Net Worth as a Percent of GDP. The underlying data is from The Federal Reserve Flow of Funds 1Q2010 report: click on chart to enlarge image As seen in the above-referenced CalculatedRisk blog post: “According to the Fed, household …
As a continuation of the last post, here are three other charts that I find disturbing in nature. These charts raise a lot of questions. Many of these questions I have discussed in the blog, as I believe they are very significant in nature. Additionally, these charts should highlight the “atypical” nature of our economic …
In the next two posts, I am going to display various charts that I find disturbing. These charts would be disturbing at any point in the economic cycle; that they depict such a tenuous situation now – nearly a year into what most believe is an economic recovery – is especially notable. Many more such …
Over the last few months, four phrases have been used frequently in describing our economic condition. I find these phrases to be inaccurate and misleading. Here are the four phrases (in italics) and some brief commentary: “the Great Recession” Many people have labeled the economic weakness (ended by the subsequent purported economic recovery) as “the …
Yesterday The Wall Street Journal had a story about Wal-Mart’s results. I found two aspects of the story notable. First, the sales results seemed particularly low in relation to the recent widespread media coverage of strong retail sales. Wal-Mart “said that U.S. sales at stores open at least a year fell 1.1%, and store visits …
I found this exchange on last Sunday’s (May 9) “60 Minutes” to be interesting. It is between Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes” and Hillary Clinton. For now I will simply post the exchange, and may comment upon it later: Pelley: “Larry Summers, the president’s economic advisor, asked this question: ‘How long can the world’s biggest …
“And long before this recession hit — for a decade — middle-class families had already been expensing — experiencing a sense of declining economic security. Their paychecks were flat-lining even though the cost of everything from groceries to college educations to health care were all going up.” President Obama, during an April 2, 2010 speech …
Here are four charts reflecting confidence from the SentimenTrader.com site. They provide a longer-term historical timeframe, which I have found to be rare. Here are the charts. Each is plotted vs. the S&P500: Conference Board Consumer Confidence, last updated 4/27/10: University of Michigan Consumer Confidence, last updated 4/16/10: ABC News Consumer Comfort Index, last updated …
One of the key questions with regard to economic activity is the extent to which it is being driven by inventory replacement. As seen in the CalculatedRisk blog of March 12, “the contribution to GDP in Q4 from ‘Change in private inventories’ was 3.88 of the 5.9 percent annualized increase in GDP.” Here are …
As an additional note to the last post, on April 12 the CalculatedRisk blog had an interesting post titled “Recession Measures.” In it, he discussed key measures that the NBER uses to determine recoveries. In the post he shows four charts, constructed in a “percent of peak” fashion. Here are the two that I find …