Political campaigns used to be laser-focused on the national debt. But in the current pandemic era, both parties have been willing to spend a lot of money to support the sagging economy.
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“How can the stock market go up, while the economy is still struggling to recover amid the pandemic?” The answer is that the stock market is not the economy and vice versa.
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Government emergency efforts worked and the economy saw significant progress in May and June. But with the virus spiking in wide swaths of the country in July, hopes have dimmed hopes for a more significant third quarter bounce.
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The government is set to release the first estimate of second quarter GDP and it’s going to be a doozy.
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None of us wants to lose that ingrained optimism, it is one of the wonders of being human. But amid the pandemic, it is instructive to look back and forward to change what we do, how we think and what we say, as credible information emerges.
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Welcome to the longest government shut down on record. Beyond the hundreds of thousands of federal employees who are feeling the most direct impact, economists are estimating how the closure might impact growth.
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The economy was on fire in the second quarter. According to the government, real annualized Gross Domestic Product (“GDP”) was 4.1 percent, the strongest quarter since Q3 2014, which came in at a sizzling 4.9 percent annual rate. As a reminder, GDP measures the nation’s total output of goods and services and is released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) on a quarterly basis, with two subsequent monthly revisions to the advance estimate.
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What happened to the tax cut bump to economic growth? After expanding by a brisk 2.9 percent in the fourth quarter of last year and the 3.3 percent rate in the third quarter, the economy decelerated a bit in the first quarter to an annualized pace of 2.3 percent, consistent with good, not great growth.
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