Friday 30 July 2010

Today's GDP Report: Getting Real About the Recession

Time
"So it was a humdinger, after all. Friday morning's GDP report, which is the first stab at estimating growth in the just completed second quarter of 2010, also provides some significant revisions to prior quarter growth estimates. The latter news is perhaps bigger than the 2nd quarter's 2.4% gain—a bit below the consensus expectation of 2.7%. But what should really rock the boat is that the Commerce department did revisions across the full span of the pre-recession and post-recession period. While this big a revision across multiple quarters is not unprecedented, it will be an eye opener to many who commonly compare this recession to ones that occurred in the past two decades. What's now clear is those comparisons were apples to oranges. What we suffered in the past recession—the depth of the contraction— hasn't been seen since the 1940s. "

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