 Today, I'd like to talk about gross domestic product and a company that I absolutely love called 3M 3M is the old Minnesota mining and manufacturing company, but most people know it for their Scotch tape and post notes But first on to GDP this week it was reported as being a very positive number at 2.9% increase in the last quarter calming fears and generally considered a positive report but if you look inside this aggregate all Encompassing number that accounts for supposedly everything in the economy you see that it's a bad report and that it indicates negative things rather than positive things and that's one of the things about Austrian economics is these all encompassing macroeconomic statistics usually end up hiding the relevant features of the statistics in the economy and Right off the top it shows as we all probably know at this point that housing is down and down Significantly and not just during this past quarter, but for several quarters now Indicating weakness in Housing which is a major player and it's a major player in growth a growing economy is one That is such that people are building more houses Investment was also weak and of course investment is key to economic growth new machinery new Software, you know if companies are buying more and more of that that indicates that they have prospects for economic growth and profits and Weakness is a sign of trouble The government spending was up and that's not a good sign And finally durable goods orders big ticket items that last three or more years at least Expected to last three or more years was also up and positive but if you look within that report what you see is that almost all of the Increase was attributable To a catch up in airplane orders. So airlines and the military are buying more planes And we can understand why given air traffic congestion but The fact that it's all in one area is Suspect so those reports would sound good on the six o'clock news Turns out aren't quite so good and actually point us in a rather negative direction So 3m it announced job cuts this past week and That might be a little bit of a surprise for some who associate 3m with scotch tape and post notes Office supplies things of that nature, you know that well basically Those are things that we don't because they're small ticket items We don't usually, you know do our budgeting around those items So we don't expect even in a recession that consumer good companies are Gonna necessarily do terrible compared to technology and finance companies But as I said, I love the 3m company and its products You're probably not even vaguely familiar with the the whole host of different things Adhesives abrasives materials Hardware cleaning supplies electrical medical dental Lubricants, you know just all sorts of things and of course tape duct tape is something they invented They've invented tons of things up there at 3m and and that's why I love them And as a matter of fact, I wrote an article many years ago about how Michael Jackson and duct tape 3m's duct tape saved me And you can find that on Lou Rockwell.com many years ago And I showed that 3m products actually helped me deal with my allergies Quite well, and it's really caught on But as I said 3m is not just a consumer products company. They do Electronics that are geared towards discretionary spending Manufacturing products industrial products Construction products so they're having trouble in those areas and in general a slowdown in 3m and this is important is a sign of Economic difficulties across the board because they sell products across the board and They're international So their sales are international their distribution is international some of their manufacturing is International and they provide components into a wide variety of other companies products They also have a couple of lawsuit problems Regarding well products that they provide for the military earplugs for example for you know military people and tanks and in cockpits around the globe and also they produce the firefighting foam for firefighters and And so they're in some legal troubles as well But our main concern here or issue is that 3m is a very diversified company product-wise and globally and Yet it's having trouble too. So it's not just the high-tech Companies the streaming companies that are having difficulties. It's really starting to show up across the board as Inflationary pressures are of course making it difficult for suppliers to raise their prices And at the same time they're facing cost Prices and slackening demand for Products and if we look back we see that When March 1st 2020 rolled around 3m stock price was a hundred and thirty six dollars was down to a hundred and thirty six dollars a share, but after The Fed opened the floodgates the Treasury spent trillions of dollars the share of 3m went up over two hundred dollars a share and most recently in today's environment the stock is selling for about a hundred and fifteen Dollars a share. So it's lost about 45 percent of its value since May of 2021 so it's a sharp sharp sell-off in a company that was often considered to be sort of immune or insulated from macroeconomic events and what this tells us is that the pain of the Fed fueled collapse Is hitting us across the board now and that we should expect the sectors that are adversely affected to continue to expand Across the economy And we should see those sub sectors within GDP continue to weekend and eventually bring GDP into the negative Category so those are two things that I was looking at this week I hope you found that of interest and helpful When looking at the economy This is Mark Thornton from the Mises Institute