by John Rubino, DollarCollapse.com:
The Consumer Metrics Institute, a consultancy with a good track record of year-ahead economic predictions, is out with its analysis of 3rd quarter GDP. By and large it’s pretty grim. Some excerpts follow without comment, since the main points pretty much speak for themselves:
In their second estimate of the third quarter 2011 GDP, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) revised the headline growth number downward by over a half percent to an annualized growth rate of 2.01%. The real story within the data, however, was that compared to last month’s “Advance” estimate the new report showed substantially weaker commercial fixed investments while the draw-down of inventory levels was more intense — putting the new numbers for third quarter aggregate commercial GDP into net contraction. In general consumer contributions were slightly weaker, while a substantial downward revision in imports somewhat softened the bad news in the headline number. Meanwhile, the public’s per-capita disposable income continued to shrink — but at a newly revised and sharply greater rate.
