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Notes -
US GDP figures are in and they're surprisingly strong:
https://www.bea.gov/news/2025/gross-domestic-product-3rd-quarter-2025-initial-estimate-and-corporate-profits
These are truly enviable numbers. In Australia we get half that and almost totally driven by immigration, no productivity growth. Europe and the UK barely get real GDP growth at all. US immigration is down, yet growth is up.
But are the US figures made up?
I imagine that there was pressure on the statisticians to fiddle the figures to put Trump in a better light.
Yet there is also the example of the Fed resisting Trump's demands for interest rate cuts. One also imagines that the economists who calculate GDP are unlikely to be Trump/tariff fans. I don't know how these factors balance out. It does seem rather surprising for US GDP growth to be so high, especially since it seems to be consumption driven rather than investment driven via the AI boom.
Personally I've long thought that GDP figures (real, PPP and especially nominal) are overvalued. Making houses more expensive by raising demand via financial schemes or immigration isn't productive economic activity, nor is much of the financial services industry (high speed trading for instance). There is obviously a role for banking and capital allocation, futures and derivatives yet it should be weighted lower compared to production of goods like iron, food, energy and aircraft engines. In many rich countries there's a whole class of highly paid consultants, officials and managers who disrupt productive activity. The food and health sector also seems rather unproductive, encouraging people to gorge on unhealthy food and then expensively treating the symptoms of obesity, shovelling money into keeping the very old alive for a few more, low-quality years... You could have a society with lower GDP but higher real-world prosperity and national power.
But the GDP figures do tell us something. More growth is usually good, especially if it's derived from productivity gains.
Do people think that the US economy is doing well? Faked numbers? K-shaped growth? Or just a result of massive deficit spending?
Big topic, little time:
We have plenty such examples today!
Do you think inflation numbers are wrong then?
Of course! I've lazy posted about this for years. Obviously, the basket of goods a person uses has gone up wildly more than the official numbers suggest - just compare the prices of food now and in your childhood. When you normalize different categories or baskets with wage increases, hours worked and labor productivity, it gets especially bad. We have also had wildly inflationary policy for decades now, which must increase to service debt while we're in a commodity supercycle where molecules matter again.
Unfortunately your previous post is nonsense.
Rent is included and 7.5% of the index. Owner occupied housing -- represented as owners equivalent rent -- is 25% of the index.
No, you just wildly misunderstood[1] my point and think I (or rather my company) am too lazy to understand basic metrics. I am saying that OER is bad and not correlated to actual housing costs. Neither mortgage and insurance payments nor differences in total purchasing vs. rental costs are captured (depending on the geography, renting can be twice or half as much as buying). BLS lags and assumes price increases are gradual such that the sampled month only shows 1/6 of the change but rental prices do not go up a few dollars per month but have big, occasional changes based on new tenants etc. (Yes, this should be smoothed and averaged out but... I am arguing that's not what's done here.) To be clear, I don't think housing is currently a big inflation driver e.g. the New Tenant index showed a much faster decline.
[1] fair, not like I effort post or think about word choice. I e.g. don't know why I focused on CPI vs. the others which I also have problems with. CPE's the only one with fed targets...
What I think, not to put too fine a point on it, is that you are claiming some sort of special expertise and knowledge you don't actually have in order to win an internet argument. It's one thing to not believe in the validity of the CPI or PCE or some other indicator. It's quite another to act as if there is some class of important people who are in the know about them being nonsense, and you are one of them. Particularly when you back that up with a rather confused notion of what's wrong with them.
Argument?
Burgers?
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