How to become a billionaire

Yen_1 

Japanese Yen.
Courtesy of Bank of Japan Currency Museum.
 

Ok,
so I mistakenly thought the US real GDP for 2006 was going to be lower,
2.5 %, and it surprised with a high of 3.4 %. Then, what was it that
compensated the loss of growth in the US housing slowdown? From the latest BEA report and
looking at the fine print (Table 2), we find that the relevant items
with contributions above the 2005 GDP are:

  • The export of goods with a
    0.24 % contribution,
  • government expenditures (mostly at the state
    level) with 0.23 %,
  • and a surprising cleanup in US inventories to the
    tone of 0.56 % …

…Christmas sales went well… and the states helped with some extra spending.

But, looking around for an excuse to my… blindness, I ran into the whopping sums that the US financial sector is harvesting around the world
–which I found a lot more interesting.

Continue reading…