Over the past few months I've seen a lot of headlines intimating that business investment is booming, and a lot saying that it's not. I was confused, so I looked into it bloomberg.com/view/articles/…
Turns out not to be any great mystery: capital spending looks great in comparison with 2016 and 2017. But by historical standards it's ... fine. 
The capital spending dip in 2016 was mainly the oil and gas industry retrenching; its return to spending has been one of the big drivers of the capex rebound, as @RaphaelBostic explained last month frbatlanta.org/news/speeches/…
Second-quarter capex numbers will be released by @BEA_News tomorrow, along with a GDP growth number expected to top 4%. This will of course lead @realDonaldTrump and his supporters to tweet about the spectacular performance of the economy. But ...
Quarterly growth has topped 4% three times since 2009. Again, the economy is now doing quite well for nine years into an expansion. It's just not *spectacular*. And much of this year's growth uptick can be explained by increased deficit spending bloomberg.com/view/articles/…
Also, I should probably add a PSA here about GDP being a flawed, incomplete measure of economic success washingtonpost.com/news/postevery…
Still, GDP numbers are fun, and tomorrow's release will include a comprehensive update that could mean significant changes to the past few years of data. bea.gov/scb/2018/04-ap…
I didn't attach the chart I meant to attach in the second tweet in this thread. It's an OK chart and all, but this one is better.
