The Commerce Department reported today that the seasonally adjusted real value of the nation's production of goods and services grew at a 3.5% annual rate during the third quarter, a little better than the 3.2% average seen since 1947.

Rate of growth of real GDP (annual rates), 1947:Q2 to 2009:Q3. Shaded regions represent dates of recessions as declared by NBER.

Consumption spending is the biggest component of GDP and the main contributor to third quarter growth, accounting by itself for 2.4 percentage points out of the 3.5% total, and with consumer purchases of motor vehicles and parts alone 3/5 of the contribution of consumption. Next in importance was inventory rebuilding, which added 0.9 percentage points to the total and could make a significant further contribution in the quarters ahead. Housing is finally making a positive rather than a negative

...

This week on WealthTrack, Consuelo Mack calls into question the long-dominant efficient market theory and explores what models should be used by investors to navigate the markets. She discusses this with two top fund managers, Jerry Senser, a former Morningstar Fund Manager of the Year and the lead portfolio manager for all of ICAP, including their MainStay ICAP Funds, and noted contrarian Robert Kleinschmidt, who manages the top-rated Tocqueville Fund. Also joining the conversation is Justin Fox, Time magazine’s economics columnist and author of “The Myth of the Rational Market”. As always with WealthTrack this is excellent viewing material.

Note: The transcript of this interview is not available yet, but will be posted here as soon as it arrives.

Source: Wealthtrack, October 16, 2009.

Did you enjoy this post? If so, click here to

...

...and the Financial and Economic Crisis

I don't read very many books. At least not during the academic year. But I have read two books recently that are quite germane to thinking about the buildup to the financial crisis, and thinking about how to respond to the current economic downturn. The first is Akerlof and Shiller's Animal Spirits. The second one is actually not yet out -- it's Justin Fox's The Myth of the Rational Market (I got a prepublication copy; here's a hint of it). They are both important books, well worth reading.

As one can guess from the titles of these two books, neither text is a paean to the predictive power of the neoclassical view of the world. I'd expect that most readers trained in this tradition would then skip this blogpost. But before you do, and go back to reading your financial industry newsletter, you

...

How many economic-advice-giving organizations does it take to run a White House?

MarketWatch reports:

President-elect Barack Obama tapped former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker to run a new White House advisory board tasked with offering independent advice about how to stage an economic recovery. Obama named the 81-year-old Volcker to head the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board....

The board is modeled on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board that gave President Dwight Eisenhower independent opinions on intelligence issues. Austan Goolsbee, another key Obama adviser, will serve as the economic board's staff director and chief economist.

Volcker can be single-handedly credited with ending the great inflation of the 1970s, and has been critical of the unorthodox steps that Fed Chair Ben Bernanke has taken to address our current challenges. Although I share some of Volcker's concerns, it is not clear to me what specifically Volcker would propose to do instead.

...

The latest employment release was stunning, insofar as the NFP employment figure was far below consensus [0]. Net job loss was 240K, rather than 200K; in addition, September job loss was revised upward by 125K. In addtion to Jim's assessment, some additional reaction is summarized here. The acceleration in net job loss is depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Nonfarm payroll employment, seasonally adjusted, various releases. Source: BLS, employment situation, various releases.

Note that Figure 1 highlights, by virtue of plotting the previous vintages of employment releases, the constant downward revision of payroll employment figures. While Dash of Insight's Jeff Miller has pointed that these revisions are small relative to the benchmark revisions will come our way, the latest revisions do seem to be getting bigger.

Justin Fox has correctly pointed out that quantitatively, net job loss in September and October is quite small, at 0.4%.

...

If you went no further than noticing that the q/q annualized growth rate of -0.3% was faster than the -0.5 in the Bloomberg consensus, you might have taken this as good news. I'm not going to say it wasn't good news (relatively speaking), although negative growth makes the case for recession pretty good according to Jeff Frankel (who is on the NBER BCDC); see also RealTime Economics. However, there are some pretty interesting things that merit additional discussion.

I think that most observers will concur with assertion that the -3.1% decline in consumption q/q annualized was the most important aspect, as highlighted in Jim's post. To place the consumption drop in perspective, consider the q/q changes in GDP and consumption over the last forty years. The last time consumption growth went negative was in the 1990-91 recession. Figure 1 show the growth rates (not contributions to GDP).

...

From the Justin Fox, regarding House Republicans' plan:

...that of the House Republican Study Committee, seems to be a joke. It calls for a two-year suspension of the capital gains tax to "encourag[e] corporations to sell unwanted assets." But the toxic mortgage securities clogging up bank balance sheets are worth less now than when they were acquired. Meaning that no capital gains tax would be owed on them anyway. If you repealed the tax, banks would have even less incentive to sell them because they wouldn't be able use the losses to offset capital gains elsewhere. Seriously, where do these people come up with this stuff?

Eric Cantor, the Republican chief deputy whip, has a more reasonable-sounding if still pretty vague plan to insure more mortgages rather than buy mortgage securities. ....

I'm in agreement with Justin that guaranteeing even more mortgages won't be any better than the original Paulson plan.

My observation

...

There's a lot of commentary -- more comprehensive and up to date than I can provide -- on the crisis and the attempts to resolve the logjam in the financial markets.[0], [1] But I stilll have a couple of thoughts about the causes, and the implications, of the process that has resulted in so much turmoil this week.

First, what is the source of the crisis? Is it as is asserted here in this statement from John McCain today?

....

There are certainly plenty of places to point fingers, and it may be hard to pinpoint the original event that set it all in motion. But let me give you an educated guess. The financial crisis we're living through today started with the corruption and manipulation of our home mortgage system. At the center of the problem were the lobbyists, politicians, and bureaucrats who succeeded in persuading Congress and the

...

There's a lot of commentary -- more comprehensive and up to date than I can provide -- on the crisis and the attempts to resolve the logjam in the financial markets.[0], [1] But I stilll have a couple of thoughts about the causes, and the implications, of the process that has resulted in so much turmoil this week.

First, what is the source of the crisis? Is it as is asserted here in this statement from John McCain today?

....

There are certainly plenty of places to point fingers, and it may be hard to pinpoint the original event that set it all in motion. But let me give you an educated guess. The financial crisis we're living through today started with the corruption and manipulation of our home mortgage system. At the center of the problem were the lobbyists, politicians, and bureaucrats who succeeded in persuading Congress and the

...

Is there anything good to say about today's report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that the U.S. unemployment rate jumped up to 6.1% while seasonally adjusted nonfarm payrolls declined by another 84,000 jobs? Well, here's one thing. It gives us some real clarity as to just where the economy stands.

Civilian unemployment rate, from FRED, with NBER recessions as shaded regions.

Sure looks like a recession when you inspect a graph the unemployment rate, doesn't it? And it also looks like a recession from the perspective of a model of unemployment dynamics that I published in 2005. If you use that model to analyze the latest unemployment numbers, you'd calculate the current probability of being in a recession at 95%.

Probability that the economy is in either a mild or severe recession at indicated date, ...