Making America Great Again; GDP Forecast Back To 4.0% -- June 2, 2017

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GDP Now

A new estimate is coming out later today. It will be interesting to see how the new forecast changes in light of the jobs report earlier today.

The most recent GDP forecast was just yesterday:

Latest forecast: 4.0 percent — June 1, 2017.

The GDPNow model forecast for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the second quarter of 2017 is 4.0 percent on June 1, up from 3.8 percent on May 30.

The forecasts for second-quarter real nonresidential structures investment growth and real government spending growth fell from 6.2 percent and -0.3 percent to 3.4 percent and -0.7 percent, respectively, after this morning's construction spending release from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The forecasts for second-quarter real consumer spending growth and real nonresidential equipment investment growth increased from 3.3 percent and 5.1 percent to 3.6 percent and 6.6 percent, respectively, after this morning's Manufacturing ISM Report On Business from the Institute for Supply Management. The model's estimate of the dynamic factor for May—normalized to have mean 0 and standard deviation 1 and used to forecast the yet-to-be released monthly GDP source data—increased from 0.30 to 0.72 after the report.

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Amazon Employees

Mark Cuban, according to CNBC: "Everyone deals with Amazon every day. When did you last see an Amazon employee?"

I see several Amazon employees every day:

• the US postman comes by every day at 12:30 p.m. local time
• the UPS brown truck usually drives through our apartment complex twice daily
• FedEx comes through several times weekly  

I don't know if I've ever seen a Mark Cuban employee -- unless the Dallas Mavericks can be seen as employees.