Finally, for what it's worth, here's the actual state of the economy in the final quarter of 2023 compared to 2022. I feel like I should hardly need to say this, but everything that should be adjusted for inflation has been.
- Real GDP growth: 4.9%
- Unemployment rate: 3.7%
- Inflation (CPI): 3.2%
- Inflation (CPI change from previous quarter): 2.8%
- Stock market (S&P 500): up 12.3%
- Consumer spending: up 2.3%
- New construction: up 8.0%
- Blue-collar hourly wages: up 1.1%
- All hourly wages: up 0.8%
- Productivity: up 2.4%
- Housing starts: up 3.4%
Home sales are down compared to last year and manufacturing orders are slightly down. Those are literally the only major economic indicators that were even slightly negative at the end of 2023.
NOTE: There are a few economic indicators that still aren't available for December. For those, I used the Oct-Nov levels compared to last year.
Good news, shmud news. We don't believe no stinking good news. Cribbed from every Republican ever.
And yet every Republican caucus-goer interviewed tonight will complain about what Joe Biden has done to the economy
Thanks Rupert
"Oh well I don't believe that ..."
Those MAGAnauts. You show them Kevin!!
Do you think there's going to be a backlash to the cage-free laws on the west coast that has apparently contributed to elevated egg prices?
Those $0.99/dozen eggs are never coming back, though they should drop over time as the capital expense of building new facilities will be paid off.
As I previously said, people judge the economy on the dumbest of things -- eggs and gasoline. I'm not being flippant; people really are bad at judging the economy.
Sigh. Regular, factory-farmed eggs are like $1.99/doz now, probably even cheaper than before the pandemic/bird flu. It's the bespoke, organic, free-range, classical music-soothed, pastured eggs that are still like $8/doz at Whole Paycheck, because, well, those producers/retailers know their well-heeled consumers will still pay that for eggs. Of course these are often also the same people who regard themselves as social media "influencers" and will go online to bitch and moan about it.
Locally, every outlet has it priced at least at $2.99/dozen.
I would never buy those expensive eggs.
Classical music ruins chickens. And I'm sorry, I can't accept drum-n-bass either, we need jungle.
My local supermarket has been selling a dozen store brand eggs for $1.99 or less for a few months. Of course, the name brand ones, which are right next to the others, can cost $5 or more per dozen.
Do most of the people buying the expensive ones know the others are half or a third as much? I have no idea.
Bird Flu???
The huge spike in egg prices in 21-22 was due 1. to the pandemic-related supply chain issues that affected many commodities across the economy and esp. 2. a bird flu outbreak in the midwest that required the culling of millions of chickens. It took about a year to replenish those flocks and prices for most eggs have pretty much returned to normal, except for the high-end, pasture raised kind, which, as I wrote above, producers discovered have very inelastic demand and so were happy to keep the prices high.
Watched some interviews with Republican caucus goers tonight.
Paraphrasing, 'I just agree with whatever her parents tell me to agree with because I really, like, trust them and they've really --looked into it --so I'm going to vote for DeSantis', she said with an air of triumph and joy.
Republicans are all about motivating nincompoops. We need to prioritize how to de-motivate nincompoops.
Unfortunately, all the non-nincompoops left Iowa long ago, which is why we get crap like this.
No state has experienced a brain drain as fast or dramatic as Iowa has.
There are places in the west where they've eliminated court proceedings that might include a jury because the population is just too obviously incompetent.
You & Katoe Porter with her whiteboard might be able to promote Biden's record better than he can.
Except to the those MAGA folks permanently lost to reason, which includes those majority-white Iowans disadvantaging themselves by sticking with caucuses.
Kevin's headline isn't remotely accurate. We've had many years where we've managed to grow faster than 2.6% (current estimate for 2023 as a whole) even in recent times.
The US economy indeed had a fairly decent 2023, but average-ish growth and a massively weakened housing market puts it at some distance from "all time great" year.
Well, yeah, several years of aggressive rate hikes by the Fed will tend to do that. The fact that the economy did this well despite the Fed's efforts to trigger a recession is pretty impressive.
The fact that the economy did this well despite the Fed's efforts to trigger a recession is pretty impressive.
Low unemployment and 2.6% growth for an already very rich country experiencing slow population expansion is a pretty solid performance, agreed, even with a dodgy housing market! But Kevin called 2023 "all time great" in his headline, which is quite an exaggeration. He seems to be going back and forth between "A recession is around the corner because the Fed has ruined everything" and "Yipee everything's wonderful." I'm going to chalk it up to the same queasy feeling I got a few hours ago when I realized Trump's odds of becoming the next president have probably gone up to about 45%. If anything, his Iowa speech suggests he may even be a bit savvier this time around about reaching out to the center (lots of boilerplate about "bringing Americans together"). It's fucking terrifying.
GDP growth 1st quarter 2.2%, 2nd 2.1 and 3rd 4.9%. gdpnow says 4th quarter was 2.2%. That works out to 2.85%. for 2023. Kevins's 4.9% is the annualized growth for the 3rd quarter of 2023. 2.8 to 2.9% growth for an economy firing on all burners (5.9% in 2021 and 2.1% in 2022) is very good.
But but but, homelessness and poverty and deaths of despair are terrible and afflict many millions!
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/opinion/beyond-deaths-of-despair.html
But the bigger problem seems to me to be that talking narrowly about despair localizes the American mortality dysfunction in a small demographic, when almost the entire country is dying at alarming rates. The burden does not fall equally, and the disparities matter. But looking globally, our mortality crisis appears, effectively, national.
Poverty is very low at the moment. One of the inevitable features of an unemployment rate reaching a 70 year low a while back. The last time unemployment was lower it was achieved by draftmg all of the able body people without jobs for combat in Korea.
"All hourly wages up 0.8%" is not great by any stretch of the imagination. Wages need to *at least* keep up with inflation. That needs to be their floor for the economy to be good for workers of any collar hue.
The 0.08 % is after adjusting for inflation. The non-adjusted rate is 4.4% for the year ending in September (I think this is one of the numbers that hasn't been updated since the fall).
0.8% is the amount wages are exceeding inflation. And it isn't really possible to consistently exceed inflation by more than that amount.
You are slipping.
I thought you always wanted things adjusted for inflation.
You can't adjust inflation for inflation. If you do that the answer is always 0 🙂
The economy looks good to me, and it certainly feels pretty good in my personal finances.
I think the biggest issue is housing. What people want and what is affordable is in direct conflict. We have lots of young people who want to live alone and lots of families that want to upgrade, and everyone wants to do it in a relatively small number of places. But rising demand in cities just increases land prices, and the labor needed to build is more expensive than ever. Most places still have onerous zoning laws and nimbyism rules almost everywhere. Because of the high costs of construction, buying a fixer-upper isn't even an option for many.
We could try to shift toward building co-ops (they still get built fairly often for senior housing), but to keep them affordable, you have to stop viewing housing as a money-maker for the owners. That just doesn't seem to work with American expectations of home ownership.
I recently saw a study noting that over 25% of deaths from opioid overdoses are among construction workers or people in the building trades. I never thought about it before, but that's a massive hit to the labor supply in that industry and has to be contributing to the shortage of contractor labor and higher costs we're seeing across the country now.
Nothing you write has changed since the end of WW2.
Real GDP growth: 4.9% vs. Blue-collar hourly wages: up 1.1% / All hourly wages: up 0.8%. Milton Friedman would be happy.
S&P was up 23% not 12%
Trump lost a single Iowa county by a single vote,
https://i.redd.it/fbctogatfscc1.jpeg
Iowa City pulls it out for Nikki Haley!