WSJ July forecast relative to CBO, IMF WEO update, and GDPNow as of yesterday:
Figure 1: GDP as reported (bold black), WSJ July survey mean (tan), CBO June projection (blue), IMF WEO July forecast (red square), and GDPNow of 7/17 (light blue square). Source: BEA 2024Q1 3rd release, July WSJ survey, IMF WEO July update, Atlanta Fed, and author’s calculations.
Interestingly, the CBO forecast from June is above the 20% trimmed high (for 2024 q4/q4) for the WSJ survey:
Figure 2: GDP as reported (bold black), WSJ July survey mean (tan), 20% trimmed hi/low range based on 2024 q4/q4 growth (gray lines), and GDPNow of 7/17 (light blue square). Source: BEA 2024Q1 3rd release, July WSJ survey, Atlanta Fed, and author’s calculations.
GDPNow as of 7/17 is registering a 2.7% q/q AR growth rate in Q2, on target for hitting the CBO projection. Interestingly, the IMF and CBO trajectories match pretty well through 2025Q4.
In terms of recession predictions, the estimated probability of a recession in the next 12 months has dropped one percentage point, to 28%. On a related point, only two respondents (out of 68 for GDP growth) forecast two consecutive quarters of negative growth: Nicholas Van Ness (Credit Agricole CIB), and Andrew Hollenhorst/Veronica Clark (Citigroup). In the April survey, 5 respondents were in this group (Van Ness is the one overlap).
Trump says that he was saved by the hand of god — who apparently deflected the bullet past Trump’s ear and directly into the skull of an innocent bystander with two young children.
It seems god does work in mysterious ways.
Trump was saved by millions of illegal immigrants (his labeling of legal asylum seekers). Had it not been for them he would not have had that exciting graph and turned towards it just in time to have a nick in his ear instead of a big hole in this brain. By the way he has not contacted any of the victims or families who were killed or hurt because of someone trying to kill him.
With respect to those immigrants who saved his life, you can say that his own incompetent and failed attempts to secure a permanent solution and his blocking GOP from voting for their own proposals, and help Biden get the border situation solved (so he could use it as an election rally prop) could have been Trump playing 15-dimensional chess, knowing the future and all that jazz – or it was just dumb luck.
https://jabberwocking.com/40959-2/
Donald Trump and the fentanyl crisis in the US
Here is J.D. Vance on the fentanyl crisis:
‘Thanks to these policies that Biden and other out-of-touch politicians in Washington gave us, our country was flooded with cheap Chinese goods, with cheap foreign labor— and in the decades to come, deadly Chinese fentanyl. Joe Biden screwed up, and my community paid the price.’
Let’s roll the tape:
When Donald Trump took office, he was bequeathed a fentanyl death rate of just under 30,000 per year. That’s a lot! When he finally retired to Mar-a-Lago at the end of his term, he left Joe Biden a fentanyl death rate of about 70,000 per year. That’s a lot more. So who exactly is it that screwed up and did absolutely nothing about addiction deaths for four years?
Kevin is right. Now here’s the question – can JD be this incredibly stupid? Or does the man just lie 24/7? MAGA!