So is the Fed worried? Was the Fed guilty of hubris in January?
Trump is right to demand fair trade from other nations, so maybe the experts are a little too skittish to think he can accomplish his goal.
thoughts?
Unexpected......................
Wait a minute. If it’s from CNBC it must be true. Right?
Weather
This is strictly anecdotal, but here it is.
For the past several years during the middle of March or thereabouts, Mrs. abb & I go to New Orleans. We come before it gets too hot, and after Mardi Gras when the hotel rates are better. We visit the WW2 Museum, the Cabildo Louisiana State Museum, shopping at the Riverwalk, etc.
But mostly we go to enjoy the restaurants, arguably among the best food in the world.
This year, the place is swarming with people. Restaurants have waiting lines that we’ve never seen before. The French Quarter was bustling with people at mid-morning, again something we’ve never seen.
At dinner last night, we asked our waiter about it. He said since the first of the year, “it’s been crazy busy.”
We asked the hotel manager, and he mentioned conventions, but the folks we’ve seen in the quarter don’t look like convention types, just regular folks.
When the Fed raises the cost of borrowing money, money is less likely to be borrowed.
It’s a setup.
How could unemployment be so low, factory orders so high, etc?
Further...Being off the mark by that much would prove a whole bunch of other things.
Not buying it.
First, the part of the announcement to note carefully:
[…] The Bureau emphasized that the fourth-quarter advance estimate released today is based on source data that are incomplete or subject to further revisionby the source agency (see “Source Data for the Advance Estimate” on page 3). The “second” estimate for the fourth quarter, based on more complete data, will be released on February 28, 2018.
Equivocators!!!
The article spells out the rest.
We end up 3.6-4’sh percent....
There were several threads here touting the high GDPNow figure that was based on a single data point. We saw this trend with the 4Q17 numbers as well - a high reading based on the first data point and more moderation as more came in. I warned people not to get too excited about that first number. I’m sure we’ll see this again in late April when they kick off the 2Q18 tracking.