The Bureau of Economic Analysis announced today that U.S. real GDP grew at a 0.2% annual rate in the first quarter. And that was even after a big inventory build-up from goods produced but not sold. Taking out the inventory contribution, real final sales fell by half a percent at an annual rate.
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Author Archives: James_Hamilton
Hitting the Fed’s targets
The economy has steadily been moving closer to the Fed’s long-run objectives. But we’re still not there yet.
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2015 Econbrowser NCAA tournament winner
Congratulations to Joseph, winner of this year’s Econbrowser NCAA tournament challenge. Even though the championship game has yet to be played, using high-level mathematics I have deduced that no one can catch Joseph’s lead, no matter who wins Monday’s game. Hats off to Joseph, Vivian Darkbloom and many others of you who answered, yes, Wisconsin could beat Kentucky.
Two number one seeds meet in the finals, just as I predicted. Unfortunately, I had the wrong pair!
World interest rates
Ben Bernanke has joined the blogosphere, offering an invaluable resource for anyone wanting to understand recent economic developments. Last week he had a series of articles examining factors behind the very low real interest rates on long-term bonds.
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Oil sands outlook
On Friday I visited the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where falling oil prices have brought a record provincial budget deficit despite aggressive tax increases and spending cuts. Here I pass along some of what I learned about how the plunge in oil prices is affecting Alberta’s oil sands operations.
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Fed moves the markets
As widely expected, at Wednesday’s FOMC meeting the Federal Reserve dropped its statement that “the Committee judges that it can be patient in beginning to normalize the stance of monetary policy”, the magic formula that many observers had thought would open the way for a hike in interest rates at the Fed’s June meeting. But the yield on a 10-year U.S. Treasury bond dropped 10 basis points immediately following the FOMC release.
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U.S. oil supply update
The EIA released a new drilling productivity report last week, allowing us to update our graph of the drilling rig count in the four major tight oil regions. Active rigs in those areas are now 32% below their peak last October, the lowest level in 3 years.
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2015 Econbrowser NCAA tournament challenge
It’s time to get ready for the world famous eighth annual Econbrowser NCAA tournament challenge, in which readers and friends of our blog are invited to demonstrate their skill (or luck) at predicting the outcome of the U.S. college mens’ basketball tournament. If you want to participate, go to the Econbrowser group at ESPN, do some minor registering to create a free ESPN account if you haven’t used that site before, and fill in your bracket some time between Sunday at 7:00 p.m. EDT and Thursday before noon.
The big question is whether anybody can beat Kentucky?
U.S. oil production still surging
The EIA is now reporting that U.S. field production of crude oil averaged almost 8.7 million barrels a day in 2014. That’s up 1.2 mb/d from 2013, and is only 0.9 mb/d below the all-time U.S. peak in 1970.
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Is the United States Protected from the European Debt Crisis?
For those of you in San Diego I wanted to call attention to a roundtable discussion this Friday March 6 on some of the ongoing concerns about European sovereign debt. I’ll be appearing along with Jeffrey Frieden from Harvard (who will be quite familiar to regular readers of Econbrowser) and David Leblang of the University of Virginia. Details on how to register for the event can be found here.