On Oct 16, 2011, at 5:12 PM, Wojtek S wrote:
> I did not argue that FRBSF did a clumsy job. I argued that the
> national accounting system, when done properly, obscures as much as it
> reveals. This is not a particularly novel idea.
Gosh, turns out they'd already thought of this.
http://www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/letter/2011/el2011-25.html
> Not all goods and services imported into the United States are directly sold to households. Many are used in the production of goods and services in the United States. Hence, part of the 88.5% of spending on goods and services labeled “Made in the USA” pays for imported intermediate goods and services. To properly account for the share of imports in U.S. consumer spending, it’s necessary to take into account the contribution of these imported intermediate inputs. We use input-output tables to compute the contribution of imports to U.S. production of final goods and services. Combining the imported share of U.S.-produced goods and services with imported goods and services directly sold to consumers yields the total import content of PCE.
>
> Table 1 also shows total import content as a fraction of total PCE and its subcategories. When total import content is considered, 13.9% of U.S. consumer spending can be traced to the cost of imported goods and services. This is substantially higher than the 7.3%, which includes only final imported goods and services and leaves out imported intermediates. Imported oil, which makes up a large part of the production costs of the “gasoline, fuel oil, and other energy goods” and “transportation” categories, is the main contributor to this 6.6 percentage point difference.
>
> The total share of PCE that goes for goods and services imported from China is 1.9%. This is 0.7 percentage point more than the share of Chinese-produced final goods and services in PCE. This difference is mainly due to the use of intermediate goods imported from China in the U.S. production of services.
Most Fed economists are not hacks. Their stuff is worth reading before drawing conclusions about it.
Doug