Real Disposable Income Growth Highest in 2008
Buried inside today's BEA report on April Personal Income (tables available here, see Table 10) is the statistic that "Real Disposable Personal Income" grew at an annual rate of 1.82% in April 2008 compared to April 2007, the highest rate of growth since December 2007 (see chart above). This will probably not get a lot of attention from the media, but provides some additional evidence that the U.S. economy is not on the verge of recession, and might in fact actually be moderately healthy.
Buried inside today's BEA report on April Personal Income (tables available here, see Table 10) is the statistic that "Real Disposable Personal Income" grew at an annual rate of 1.82% in April 2008 compared to April 2007, the highest rate of growth since December 2007 (see chart above). This will probably not get a lot of attention from the media, but provides some additional evidence that the U.S. economy is not on the verge of recession, and might in fact actually be moderately healthy.
4 Comments:
i actually like your year over year comparison (showing an increase) better, but it is interesting to note that compared to last month BEA states:
"Real disposable personal income decreased less than 0.1 percent in April . . . Real PCE decreased less than 0.1 percent . . ."
I'd feel better about this if I had more faith in the inflation numbers they're publishing.
Are you hanging your hat on the latest uptick?
It should continue to pick up for the next several months as the stimulus cheques are issued. Then what happens? Nominal wage and salary compensation (which is the majority of DPI) declined in April from March you know.
Real DPI rarely goes negative on an annualized basis and didn't for the 2001 recession.
The NBER dating committee will just ignore the stimulus cheques as it focuses on real DPI less government transfers.
This is one of the few positive reports on the economy that I've seen this year.
Post a Comment
<< Home