1Q2025 real GDP revised down 0.3 to -0.5 in third and final estimate on an increase in imports front-loaded into 1Q to avoid Trump's tariffs

 Real gross domestic product (GDP) decreased at an annual rate of 0.5 percent in the first quarter of 2025 (January, February, and March), according to the third estimate released by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the fourth quarter of 2024, real GDP increased 2.4 percent.

 

The decrease in real GDP in the first quarter primarily reflected an increase in imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, and a decrease in government spending. These movements were partly offset by increases in investment and consumer spending.

 

Real GDP was revised down 0.3 percentage point from the second estimate, primarily reflecting downward revisions to consumer spending and exports that were partly offset by a downward revision to imports. ...

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Sounds like Howard Lutnick gobbledygook at the end there. Paragraph two speaks of an increase in imports. Paragraph three of a downward revision to imports. 

Which is it lol? 

Nominal 1Q2025 GDP clocks in at $29.962 trillion in the third estimate. SPX was at 5612 on Mar 31, yielding a crazy high stock market valuation of 187.  

LOL Kevin Williamson: He had a such good sermon going and then suddenly took the inevitable left turn with it and crashed it into a ditch filled with gobbledygook

We who have been exiles must be the new mothers and new fathers to exiles. We who have been poor and hungry, who have been powerless, who have been dependent on the kindness of others, must be splendid in our own generosity. And we who have benefited from the example of the meekest of all the men who were upon the face of the Earth — we must not forget our true heritage — must not consent to be called the sons of Pharaoh’s daughter. This pilgrim republic, fearfully and wonderfully made, was made for better things and higher things. Wealth, power, reputation — these are, at best, means to some higher end, to be used judiciously and with gratitude but never with awe. These are our instruments — they must not be our gods.

Come out from among them, and be ye separate, Americans. Come home. 

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It never occurs to Williamson that America as the New Israel pretty much did what the Old Israel did, invading the land flowing with milk and honey where they slew all the Canaanites.

Well, almost all of them. The failure of nerve which plagues America still, most obviously in Williamson, was present already at the beginning. Now the roles are reversed and it is the Injuns who ply US with alcohol and take all our money at the casinos.

Some analogies just shouldn't be pressed too hard unless you want to join the left in wringing your hands over what our forefathers did. Doing so only leads in one other direction: The Biblical imagery coheres better with the alt-right vision of America.

Cancel, or keep getting canceled until the country is no longer yours and your posterity's.

"two-year suspension of the debt ceiling expired at the end of July"

Pure gobbledygook.

The limit, a facet of American politics for over a century, prevents the Treasury from issuing new bonds to fund government activities once a certain debt level is reached. That level reached $22 trillion in August 2019 and was suspended until Saturday. 

The new debt limit will include Washington’s additional borrowing since summer 2019. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in July that the new cap will likely come in just north of $28.5 trillion.

More gobbledygook.

The government's bookkeeping shenanigans here are always amazing, but especially now given the orgy of spending during the pandemic, and the reporting is nearly as bad.

The debt ceiling was "set" at $22 trillion in August 2019, but it wasn't "reached" until April 2021.

Add in the ever present "intragovernmental" borrowings and the total debt is now $28.46 trillion at the end of July. Intragovernmental holdings is code for raiding the Medicare and Social Security Trust Funds. It's one of the weird things about how bureaucrats think that the extent to which they must raid those funds plus the "normal" public debt becomes the sum they'll use to set the new "public" portion, the debt ceiling, when Congress gets around to it.

They all should be in jail. Instead we are.