Keeping North Dakota Great -- June 13, 2018 -- Air Quality Permit Approved For Davis Refinery, Southwest North Dakota

Link at Bismarck Tribune.

The department issued the permit to Meridian Energy to construct the Davis Refinery near Belfield after reviewing more than 10,000 public comments.

It would be interesting to get an analysis of the number of:

• "robo" comments
• form letters via e-mail; number with relevant comments
• out-of-state comments
• non-ND-resident comments

Remember this from an earlier post?

• New refinery: Meridian's Belfield refinery, 45-day comment period
• more than 11,000 comments
• of those, 10,068 were form letters via e-mail; none with relevant comments
• of all comments, 22% received from the west coast, specifically Oregon, Washington, and California
• 1.8% of the comments were from North Dakota respondents

It's interesting that both the the "refinery permit" and the "air quality permit" had an almost equal number of submissions.

For an update of refinery projects in North Dakota, see this February, 2018, post.

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GDP Now

Latest forecast: 4.6 percent — June 8, 2018.

The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the second quarter of 2018 is 4.6 percent on June 8, up from 4.5 percent on June 6.

After this morning's wholesale trade release from the U.S. Census Bureau, the nowcast of the contribution of inventory investment to second-quarter real GDP growth increased from 0.99 percentage points to 1.06 percentage points.

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"Fed Rate"

The "Fed" raises "rate" to 2.5%. Two more rate increases this year would bring the "Fed rate" to 3.0%.

History of US recessions.

History of "Fed rates."

Past decade:

 Multi-decade: