I had the pleasure of speaking with UW’s Ian Coxhead and Sandi Siegel, President of MITA and of ME Dey, at Talking Trade last week about trade, direct investment and competition in technology production.
The Economic Policy Uncertainty index, calculated using the Baker, Bloom and Davis methodology:
IHS-MarkIt (nee Macroeconomic Advisers) released monthly GDP today. The July employment situation will be released this Friday.
With large shares of populations vaccinated, case counts are no longer a good predictor of fatalities arising from Covid-19. Hospitalization might prove better (and ICU hospitalizations even better). The statistics do not augur well, particularly for Florida.
Angus, Atalay, Newton and Ubilava write “Editorial boards of leading economics journals show high institutional concentration and modest geographic diversity”. There’s no doubt diversity of all types is an issue of concern in the economics professions, and here’s one more dimension.
With apologies to John Donne.
Jim provided some key points in his Thursday post regarding the 21Q2 advance figures. Here are my additional takeaways: (1) the Administration’s forecast locked down in February looks prescient; (2) Final sales were higher than GDP, (3) exports have not buttressed growth, partly because of slow rest-of-world growth, (4) price growth is a rising share of nominal GDP growth.
Consumption, personal income and St. Louis Fed’s real manufacturing and trade industry sales were released today. The July employment situation will be released next Friday. This is the picture today.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis announced today that seasonally adjusted U.S. real GDP grew at a 6.5% annual rate in the second quarter. That’s well above the 3.1% average growth that the U.S. experienced over 1947-2019. Kudos to Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta economist Patrick Higgins, whose nowcast of 6.4% that Menzie highlighted yesterday anticipated today’s release on the nose.
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Q2 GDP will be released tomorrow morning, and Jim will be providing his insights on the numbers. Today, the IMF released its July 2021 World Economic Outlook forecasts, which gives us and opportunity to recap where we stand. [Updated 7/29, 1pm Pacific]
The upward trend in acres burned is shown below.