James Pethokoukis

Via John Ellis:

The answer, I think, is that whatever pivot is made will be irrelevant. The fact is President Obama doesn’t have the luxury of proposing an agenda. Agendas (or at least, agendas as we have come to think of them) are for people who have money. The United States is broke. And the debt gets worse by the day.

Therefore, President Obama’s job is to get us out of debt (or start us down the path toward that end). This job would be difficult in the best of times. President Obama has to do it in the midst of the worst recession since the 1930s. He has to do it in the midst of two wars in regions perpetually hostile to foreign influence. And he has to do it in the midst of a global recession so severe that it now threatens what erudite commentators call the “social cohesion” of our allies and trading partners around the world.

That being the case, and I think it is inarguably the case, President Obama will never be successful until he accepts the assignment that history has given him. No one (anywhere) believes for one moment that he can add 30-35 million people to the health insurance rolls and not increase (sharply) the cost of health insurance. President Obama has been peddling this fable for months now and it has only served to make him look either (a) naive, or (b) utterly cynical. No one believes that “cap and trade” legislation is anything like an urgent priority at this time. No one believes that securing the Olympics for Chicago in 2016 is an urgent use of the President’s time. No one believes that President Obama deserved or should have accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. The reason that Obama has seen his approval rating fall sharply is that people think he’s not doing his job.

His job is to get the country on a path to fiscal sustainability and to defeat (as much as humanly possible) those who seek to put nuclear weapons in our cities and detonate them in time for the evening news. His job, more accurately, is to cut costs, delay benefits, right-size government programs, rethink military and diplomatic strategies, re-focus our war efforts, all while rebuilding (or expanding) intellectual and physical infrastructure for the years ahead. And he must do all this while devising new strategies for jump-starting wealth creation. It’s more than enough agenda for anyone, even someone with President Obama’s admirable self-confidence and perhaps grandiose self-esteem.

“Stop spending money you don’t have” was the real message of the Massachusetts Senate election that vaulted Senator-elect Brown from the back benches of one of the most useless political institutions in America (the Massachusetts State Senate) onto the front page of The New York Times. “Do your job,” was the other, direct message to President Obama.

That is how IHS Global calls it:

The fourth-quarter GDP surge was produced by a sharp turn in the inventory cycle. Firms still cut inventories in the fourth quarter, but much less severely than in the third. That led to increased production, which boosted GDP. Final sales growth, a better guide to the underlying path of the economy, was much more sedate, at 2.2%, but that was still an improvement on the third quarter’s 1.5% pace.

The best news in final sales was on exports and business spending. Exports surged 18.1%, their second strong increase in a row. And there was a 13.3% increase in business spending on equipment and software (two-fifths of which came from computers). The improving trend in capital goods orders suggests more gains in equipment spending ahead. If firms are feeling confident enough to raise their equipment spending, they’re probably confident enough to start hiring again. That will support consumer spending, which showed a moderate 2.0% gain in the fourth quarter.

The weakest spot was business structures spending, down sharply again as the commercial real estate crisis took its toll.

We must be careful in drawing implications for the future from today’s release. There’s more help to come from the inventory cycle, since inventories were still falling in Q4. But we won’t see a boost as big as 3.4 percentage points again. And we’re doubtful that foreign trade can continue to be a plus for growth, as we expect imports to rebound.

The Q4 GDP surge doesn’t change the view that growth is likely to be subdued by historical standards, in the 2.5-3.0% region for 2010.

Or so says RDQ Economics:

The recovery from the Great Recession firmed in the fourth quarter as real GDP increased at its fastest rate since the third quarter of 2003.  However, also as expected, a sharp slowing in inventory liquidation accounted for 3.4 percentage points (or 60%) of the 5.7% increase in real GDP.  We are particularly impressed by the 13.3% increase in nonresidential investment (upside risk in this area was flagged by yesterday’s durable goods report).

We were also pleased that none of the growth came from government spending, which fell by 0.2%.  From the Fed’s perspective, however, this report does not bring a rate hike closer.  First, the unemployment rate rose from 9.6% in the third quarter to 10.0% in the fourth (raising upside risk to the estimates for potential growth).  Second, the GDP deflator increased by only 0.6% (although, perhaps counter-intuitively, this modest gain was due to the subtraction effect of higher import prices, which surged 16.3%—the price index for domestic purchases rose 2.1% in the fourth quarter, which is a measure of what people and businesses paid, whereas the GDP price index measures the price of what the U.S. produced).

Nominal GDP growth was a robust 6.4% in the quarter (and 0.8% year-over-year).  As the addition to growth from inventories fades somewhat, we see growth in the first quarter of 2010 at around 2½%