We're Officially Unofficially In a Recession as the Government Reports the First Quarter GDP Shrank 1.4%

Unexpectedly, the most incompetent and socialist (fake) president in history delivers the expected bitter fruits of incompetence and socialism.

The U.S. economy cooled markedly in the first three months of the year, as snarled supply chains, record-high inflation and labor shortages weighed on growth and slowed the pandemic recovery.

Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced across the economy, shrank by 1.4% on an annualized basis in the three-month period from January through March, the Commerce Department said in its first reading of the data on Thursday.

Refinitiv [an analysis/data firm] economists expected the report to show the economy had expanded by 1.1%.

There's your "unexpectedly."

It marked the worst performance since the spring of 2020, when the U.S. economy was still deep in the throes of the COVID-induced recession.

"Today's shock drop in GDP is a wake-up call that the economy isn't as strong as we all thought," said Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer for Independent Advisor Alliance. "It's possible that GDP gets revised higher next month, as this is just the first release and there will be two revisions, but it is a warning sign."

I've previously quoted analysts who offered their suspicion that we're currently in a recession, which would soon be officially confirmed as one.

The strict technical definition of a recession is "Two consecutive quarters of negative growth" (shrinkage, as noted economist Costanza would say).

They were pretty certain that given the huge amounts of inflation, and the diminishing "growth" returns from simply coming out of a self-imposed national lockdown, that the second quarter, the upcoming quarter, would be recessionary one.

And they also suspected that the current quarter -- which was actually the one that just passed, the first quarter -- would also turn out to be a quarter of contracting economic activity.

So their idea was:

The then-future second quarter: Just about guaranteed to be a recessionary quarter

The then-current first quarter: Likely to turn out to be a recessionary quarter

So the quarter which they judged to be less likely to be recessionary, the first quarter, just turned out to be recessionary.

The next quarter will almost surely be another quarter of economic contraction, and thus our decrepit, dying-brained Fake President will have created a f***ing recession due to toxic levels of overspending when all he had to do was just open the economy and let the natural rebound effect produce quarter after quarter of growth.

And I can't wait for all the excuses.

And I can't wait for the claims that we just have to spend more and more trillions to fight the inflation caused by the last pile of trillions we injected into the economy, which caused the inflation.

And I can't wait for the media to parrot these claims, and I can't wait for the government's new Disinformation Governance Board to rule that any claim that pouring trillions of Fake New Dollars into an economy causes the value of every dollar in the economy to decline, due to the ancient and iron law of supply and demand, is Russian Disinformation, and that social media companies are required to provide warnings stating that it is such.

posted by Ace at 01:17 PM

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