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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?
My Vanguard stocks are up 14% since this time last year. That's my lazy rule of thumb on how well the economy is doing, so that probably means the economy is doing well. There's a bunch of other possible explanations such as inflation, giant economic bubbles, or expectations that GDP will go up soon but hasn't yet. But the Trump administration faking numbers is unlikely to cause this, as the greedy and intelligent investors are unlikely to be conned so easily.
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