Word: gdp
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...numbers Friday, and none of them good. The Commerce Department said U.S. GDP in the first quarter (January to March) didn't really grow 2 percent, as previously estimated - the new Q1 number is 1.3 percent. Orders for durable goods - cars, computers and the like - fell an ugly 5 percent in April after rising a revised 2.2 percent in March. And existing home sales, which make up 80 percent of the housing market, fell 4.2 percent to an annual rate of about 5.2 million last month, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) reported, - a day after new home sales...
...often venal bureaucratic steps. As a result, the Third World's poor--two-thirds of the world's population--have little choice but to work outside the legal system. De Soto estimates the value of their extralegal property at $9.3 trillion--about as large as the annual GDP of the U.S. economy. More than two-thirds of Latin America's construction is never legally registered--a big reason, De Soto found, why cement sales in Brazil bear little relation to official building figures. "We show a President the extralegal map, and it knocks his socks off. He realizes he doesn...
...weekly number of 450,000 is thought to mark the presence of a recession, and 421,000 is pretty close, and 4.5 percent (while historically low) is higher than last month's 4.3. Free-spending consumers got us two percent GDP growth in the first quarter, but what are they going to do now? Possibly they have been charging it so far on their credit cards, expectant of continued employment. That feeling of security may be about to erode...
Maybe it was the warm weather. Maybe it was that the expected onslaught of anti-globalism protests never materialized. And maybe it was the U.S.'s first-quarter GDP numbers. But considering the currently tenuous state of the global economy - slowdown in the U.S., slowdown in Europe, recession in Japan, not to mention the ongoing meltdowns in Turkey and Argentina - this weekend's meeting of finance ministers and central bankers from the G7 industrialized nations was a surprisingly cheery affair...
...still in an uncertain position. The GDP numbers will be revised as the month goes on, and I wouldn't be surprised if these numbers went down a little. The big question will be with the Fed - has it moved enough, and how much will it move...