NYT
The U.S. economy came out of its tailspin in the second quarter and may be poised to resume growing, even as new signs of economic strain showed up in Europe.
U.S. gross domestic product -- a broad measure of the value of goods and services produced -- contracted at a 1% annual rate last quarter, its slowest pace in a year. That was a marked improvement from the first-quarter contraction of 6.4% and the fourth quarter's 5.4% pullback.
....
The U.S. recession appears to be near an end, government figures suggest, even as revisions to prior years' data show that the downturn has been even more severe than previously thought.
Gross domestic product fell at a seasonally adjusted 1.0% annual rate April through June, the U.S. Commerce Department said Friday in the first estimate of second-quarter GDP. That was better than the 1.5% decline Wall Street economists had expected.
See here's the problem. all these news agencies decided to only read the first page of the report and forgot about the other 50 pages. To summarize lets announce headline numbers and then casually revise previous quarters' better than expected headline numbers down to absurdly bad numbers. Instead of shrinking at an annual clip of 5.5%, as originally reported, America's GDP shrunk at a rate of... 6.4%. Justin Lahart (who wrote the NYT article I am linking) curiously has some trouble with math because when I add 0.9% to 1.0% I get a result over 1.5%. On top of that, if we include 2008 with the first quarter of 2009, the BEA revised total GDP "growth" downward by 4.9%
No one seems to care about prior revisions. They only want to hear made up numbers that are most assuredly going to be revised down in the upcoming quarters.
Its a wonder why these print publications are losing to lowly blogs such as mine... they can't even tell the whole story. Why you ask? Because doom and gloom doesn't sell ad space.
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