Last week, the Commerce Department reported that, in the third quarter of the year, the Gross Domestic Product rose at an annualized rate of 2.8 per cent — higher than expected.
Real consumer spending, after collapsing in 2009, has risen for nine straight quarters; this past quarter it was up at an annualized rate of 2.4 per cent.
Total consumer spending, which makes up about two-thirds of G.D.P., increased at an annualized rate of three per cent in the first quarter of the year: this was barely different from the 3.3 per cent increase seen in the final three months of 2013.
Macroeconomic Advisers, one of the country's leading private forecasting firms, issued a report today estimating that U.S. G.D.P. is tracking in the fourth quarter toward an annualized rate of contraction of 6.6 per cent.
And for the New York metropolitan area as a whole, according to the widely watched S&P/Case-Shiller home-price indices, prices are rising at an annualized rate of less than five per cent.
Largely as a result of the frozen weather, the economy contracted by 0.6 per cent on an annualized basis between January and March, according to the Commerce Department.
After all, in the second quarter of the year the Gross Domestic Product had expanded at an annualized rate of almost three per cent — and the unemployment rate was under six per cent.
His pitch to them was that while investing in West Africa carried significant risks, not least civil war and disease, the rewards could be both financial (annualized returns of twenty to thirty per cent) and social (assisting in the process of economic development).
Is it really plausible that in the first and second quarters of this year the Chinese economy expanded at an annualized rate of precisely seven per cent, which just happens to be the official target for growth in what President Xi Jinping has called the "new normal" era?
Given the unusually bitter weather, Wall Street had been expecting a slowdown from the previous quarter, when the economy expanded at an annualized rate of 2.6 per cent.
That sounds like an appealing discount until you learn that the law permits lenders to charge an annualized interest rate of as high as two hundred and forty per cent.
