Personal Income Dropping

Stocks corrected from yesterday’s big up by having a big down, down 171 points. All other markets moved sideways.

In the news today….

Personal Income in July was down 0.7%, and this is a bigger deal than the number would suggest. Personal Income has been falling over the past 3 months, and this is bad news for personal spending. Personal spending is the largest component of US GDP, and will reflect badly in the 3rd Quarter. Oh, by the way, the Personal Income was biased Upward by the rebate checks that came out during the 2nd Quarter – so without those checks, the Personal Income would have been LOWER.

Here are Today’s numbers:
Dow Jones 30 Industrial – 11,544 (down 171 points)
10 Year Treasury Bond – 3.81% (up 0.02%)
Euro – $1.4671
Gold – $835 (down $2)
Oil – $115.46 (down $0.13)
Gasoline – $2.85 (down $0.01)

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 30th, 2008 at 8:36 am and is filed under U.S. Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Personal Income Dropping”

Betty Metzger on August 30th, 2008 at 10:55 am

Say, Tom, in your opinion, is gold the best investment today?

Betty (QM 2)
Tom Harvey on September 1st, 2008 at 10:07 am

Hi Betty,

That is a very tough question, but easy to answer. There is always a “better” investment for anything you can think of – that’s the nature of the beast. However, i’ll take your question to mean gold vs. stocks or bonds or real estate or diamonds or uranium, etc.

My real answer is gold is a good investment right now in our time of turmoil. I believe in a year or two, real estate could be a dynamite investment. Real estate can be a good investment today, if you buy right; but, i think it will get a lot better.

Gold should remain better than stocks or bonds. Some commodities could do better than gold, but you better know everything there is to know about a different commodity before buying it. (just a word to the wise).

Tom