SP Global’s monthly GDP series is up (with prediction of flat GDP in Q3):
Figure 1: Nonfarm Payroll from CES (bold blue), civilian employment with smoothed population controls (orange), industrial production (red), Bloomberg implied consensus as of 8/13 (red square), personal income excluding current transfers in Ch.2017$ (bold light green), manufacturing and trade sales in Ch.2017$ (black), consumption in Ch.2017$ (light blue), and monthly GDP in Ch.2017$ (pink), GDP (blue bars), all log normalized to 2021M11=0. Source: BLS via FRED, Federal Reserve, BEA 2025Q2 advance release, S&P Global Market Insights (nee Macroeconomic Advisers, IHS Markit) (8/1/2025 release), and author’s calculations.
Bloomberg consensus for industrial production is 0% growth in August (red square).
PPI up 0.9% m/m in July, headline and core:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ppi.nr0.htm
Rotten old BLS, making the felon-in-chief look bad again.
PPI comes in 4 times higher than expected. and the trump tariffs have hardly even started, given his TACO approach to delaying their implementation. was listening to Navarro on Bloomberg yesterday-what a piece of crap this guy is. he wants to claim that he is correct on the tariff and inflation issue and close the conversation. why so insistent? he is adamant that we judge the situation today, because he knows tariffs have hardly been implemented and certainly are not flowing through the system yet-so are unmeasured. but even then, you get a rate today that is 4 times what is expected, and it is early and TACO has continued to delay their implementation. based on this behavior, the trump administration very well knows what is coming, and is trying to get ahead of the narrative. and getting back to Navarro. never heard a more dishonest person in my life. what a creep he is. made me puke simply listening to him on the radio. the jailbird thinks he is smarter than Goldman Sachs? dementia must be setting in with his old age.
At last, a U.S. Senator has actually proposed legislation to preserve Social Security:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/bernie-sanders-social-security-bill
Of course, the author is not a Democrat, but 20 Democratic Senators have signed on to his bill. Twenty? There are 47 Democrats in the Senate, and fewer than half have signed on to the bill.
Bernie’s bill won’t pass, but it will tell voters there’s a problem, who wants to fix the problem, and who’s on their side. And only 20 Dems have signed on. Just shoot me.