October 29, 2015

GDP Growth Clocks In at Sluggish 1.5% in Third Quarter

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Well, this kind of sucks: GDP growth in the third quarter clocked in at an anemic 1.5 percent. Consumer spending was up 3.2 percent, but inventories shrank:

The change in private inventories was by far the largest factor holding back stronger growth, subtracting 1.44 percentage points from the overall advance. The pairing down of stockpiles could suggest businesses aren’t confident about future demand and avoided overproducing. The figure could also reflect that falling prices for oil and other commodities caused the dollar value of inventories to decline.

Headwinds from overseas are just too persistent. Europe is weak and China is faltering. In the face of that, it’s hard for the American economy to pick up any steam.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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