It’s easy and fun to blame China for everything, but we still have plenty of home-brewed economic troubles right here at home. The latest bad news comes from the Atlanta Fed:
While economists continue to search for signs that domestic growth is finally loosening the shackles of the financial crisis, the data suggest otherwise. An initial reading Monday for the third-quarter manufacturing outlook was bleak, and the spending outlook both for consumers and businesses does not suggest rapid improvement anytime soon.
Hence, the result: The Atlanta Federal Reserve’s GDPNow tracking tool, which has been a pretty reliable rule of thumb lately, indicates third-quarter advancement of just 0.7 percent, with the momentum to the downside. The indicator has dropped 0.3 percentage point just in the past week as the model adjusts for a likely decline in inventory build for the three-month period.
Unexpectedly.
