Sage Advice Quarterly Market Review 4Q2003

When the legendary baseball guru Casey Stengel cited a fact, he would often challenge listeners to “look it up.” In one of his more ingenious factoids later in life, he exclaimed to a startled reporter that “most people my age are dead.” Well, the facts today describe an economy that is racing ahead at a breakneck pace. In the just-ended third quarter, consumer spending staged the strongest increase since 1988, fueled by torrid sales of autos and other big-ticket items. The spending surge, along with red-hot housing activity and reviving investment outlays, powered the strongest upsurge in the economy’s growth rate in more than18 years during the period, as real GDP soared by a blistering annual rate of 7.2%.