The CBO projects that the FY2014 budget deficit will be $514 billion, 3% of GDP, and will be just $478 billion or 2.6% of GDP in FY2015. The deficit then begins to rise as a percentage of GDP. A key…
With $6.2 billion in gambling revenues, Las Vegas is the top casino market in the US, Atlantic City with $3.1 billion is second. Chicagoland is third at $2.2 billion, Detroit is fourth with $1.4 billion and Connecticut is number five…
The US economy is 3.5 times bigger the than of Japan. Yet at current exchange rates, the Bank of Japan is injecting $53 billion/month into its banking system, equivalent to the Fed injecting $187 billion/month into ours rather than the…
Touchdown Totals The NFL has revenues of $10 billion/year, more than any other sports league and its revenues are almost as big as the GDP of The Bahamas. Over the next decade, the NFL plans to increase its revenues to…
While naysayers dismissed today’s 3.2% Q4 annualized GDP growth number because 0.42% of it was from a rise in inventories, excluding them Q4 GDP was 2.8% while Q3 GDP was just 2.5%! Moreover, a drastic decline in federal government defense…
Six years after the start of the Great Recession, the total number of vehicle miles traveled (VMTs) is still 2.27% below the pre-recession high. Moreover, per capita VMTs are down a whopping 7.82% since peaking in June 2005. In the…
While the Fed balance sheet recently crossed $4 trillion, the amount that’s in Treasury securities is $2.23 trillion while the amount in mortgage backed securities is $1.53 trillion, for a total of $3.76 trillion, with the remaining $290 billion in…
Despite the weak December jobs report, the Fed will announce later this week that it’s reducing its monthly purchases of Treasuries and mortgage backed securities by another $10 billion to $65 billion/month, down from $75 billion/month in mid-December. Manufacturing continues…
The Friday File: While Maryland remains the state with the highest percentage of millionaire households (MH) at 7.7%, it’s followed closely by New Jersey, Connecticut, Hawaii and more distantly by Alaska. During 2012, North Dakota experienced the greatest percentage increase…
With short-term interest rates near zero and inflation very mild, real short-term interest rates (nominal interest rates minus the inflation rate) are slightly negative. To boost investment spending and the economy, the Fed should push real interest rates further into…