America Will Lose Any Trade War – Ep. 224

* Earlier this morning we got the first look at Q4 GDP
* As I suggested on the last podcast, in fact as I have been saying all along
* We did see a sharp decline from the Q3 3.5% GDP
* The consensus was for a 2.2% estimate for growth in Q4
* And we came in at 1.9%
* Quite a way below estimates and psychologically below the 2% number
* Part of the reason was a big drop in exports
* I talked about this last quarter
* One of the reasons we got that 3.5% jump in Q3 GDP
* Was the big surge in soybean exports, because of a drought overseas
* Which created a temporary increase for U.S. beans
* The rest of it was an inventory build, which I still think needs to be worked off
* In fact, I think we're going to work off a lot of it in the first quarter of this year
* That's the first estimate, and, who knows, they may downward revise it the next time they give us the numbers
* If you now take the first 3 quarters of GDP growth, and use the first estimate for Q4
* For the entire year of 2016 GDP grew at just 1.6%
* That is the lowest number since 2009, tied with 2011, at 1.6% also
* If you remember 2011 GDP growth was so weak that they launched QE3 for 2012
* So they ended QE2, the economy started rolling over
* And when they got that 1.6% GDP for the entire year
* The Fed very quickly came out and launched QE3 the following year to goose the GDP back up
* What are they doing now? Not only is the Fed not preparing to launch another round of QE
* They are tightening monetary policy
* They're saying, "We're going to raise interest rates 3 times, even though GDP is as low as it has been for the entire "recovery'
* Even though the economy is decelerating, we are going to sedate it with rate hikes
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