Holiday pot pourri

Just a few thoughts as we wind down toward the new year...

* The US economy seems to be ending the year on a strong note, per this article from CNN.  The 2.1 percent annualized GDP growth rate originally reported for Q3 has been revised up to 2.3 percent, and modeling from the Atlanta Fed suggests a sharp acceleration to north of 7 percent for the final quarter.

Perhaps the most surprising stat in the CNN article is the news that US consumer confidence actually rose in December.  Evidently a lot of Americans are managing to avoid all of the hand-wringing over the omicron variant, with CNN very much in the forefront. It's very doubtful that confidence can remain high if hospitalizations and deaths start to mirror the rise in infections that omicron is driving. Q1 of 2022 looks likely to be a tough one for the economy, with the severity and duration of the slowdown almost entirely dependent on how omicron behaves. 

* The Canadian economy began the final quarter of the year on a strong note, according to one key indicator released by Statistics Canada today. Retail sales rose 1.5 percent in current dollar terms, or 0.9 percent in real terms, in the month of October.  Seven of the eleven sub-sectors posted gains, led by auto sales. StatsCan estimates that retail sale rose as further 1.2 percent in November. 

Just as in the US, the outlook for the Canadian economy is omicron dependent. Restrictions have been tightened across the country, most notably in Quebec, so it is very likely that the all-important retail sector will slow significantly in December and for at least the early part of 2022. (UPDATE, December 22: StatsCan reported today that real GDP rose 0.8 percent in October, and an estimated further 0.3 percent in November, which would bring GDP back within 0.1 percent of its pre-pandemic level. A strong GDP result for Q4 as a whole is just about locked in, but this tells us very little about how Q1/2022 will unfold).

* the lazy dog -- and on an entirely different note, the new Jane Campion movie, The Power of the Dog, appears to be the front-runner for the Best Picture Oscar. I watched this last weekend, and can only say, seriously?  The scenery is lovely and the acting is fine, but the pace is glacial. And the plot? Quite honestly, there's not nearly enough of that to fill a movie that runs more than two hours.

An interesting discussion of the movie by two critics can be found here on Slate. Warning: multiple spoilers! One of them liked it, while the other reacted to it much the same as I did. It's interesting that they agree that you really need to see it twice to figure out what happens. That set me thinking: do directors now feel free to make movies baffling because they assume just about everyone will watch via streaming rather than in a theatre, and can therefore watch as many times as needed to understand what they're watching? If so, that doesn't seem to me to be a good thing.

* Happy holidays! And finally, best wishes to all visitors to this blog for a safe and healthy holiday season. Hope to see you all again in 2022.