Maybe, maybe not. The NYT headline blares “Tariffs Shrank Trade Deficit in September, New Data Show”. Imports did decrease from earlier, but that’s after a tremendous surge. The actual article is a more nuanced (i.e., that’s a lousy title).
Fed Chair Powell has suggested that the BLS birth-death model is overstating per month job creation by 60K since April. If so, nonfarm payroll employment is trending down.
Just under two months ago, GDPNow’s estimate of the contribution of final sales to private domestic purchasers (sum of consumption and fixed investment) to GDP growth (q/q AR) was 2.84%, close to the Survey of Professional Forecasters’ median; now it’s 2.15%.
My estimates based on ADP, JOLTS based estimate (courtesy Paweł Skrzypczyński). Delayed CES report on 12/16 (coming out with November release).
From The Hill:
A staple of mid-1980’s investment modeling, q-theory was an alternative to the Keynes’ marginal efficiency of capital or Jorgenson user cost of capital approaches. A version of q –the ratio of market value to replacement value of a corporation’s capital — was central in Summers’ 1981 BPEA paper modeling corporate investment behavior. And yet, q-theory is now almost completely absent from recent discussion of the level of capital investment (in contrast to the debate nearly two decades ago). Why? First a picture of q, the market price relative to replacement cost of physical capital.
I don’t have a resolution to the debate, but I have an insight, regarding per capita series (which is different from aggregate statistics used to determine a recession), summarized in a couple graphs.
I haven’t been following the development of stablecoins, both before and after the signing into law of the so-called “GENIUS Act”, so I found this paper a must-read: “Stablecoins: A Revolutionary Payment Technology with Financial Risks”, by Rashad Ahmed, James A. Clouse, Fabio Natalucci, Alessandro Rebucci & Geyue Sun, NBER Working Paper No 34475. [ungated version]
