Recession?

From Mark Perry

Quoting from the Wall Street Journal he writes:

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. economy doubled its speed in the spring, driven by higher exports, falling imports, and rising spending by consumers given tax rebates meant to neutralize the housing slump. Gross domestic product rose at a seasonally adjusted 1.9% annual rate April through June, the Commerce Department said Thursday in the first estimate of second-quarter GDP (see chart above, recessions shaded).

But over at Business Week, Michael Mandel writes:

I’ve steadily maintained that the economic data overstated the strength of the economy, and today we had the first confirmation. The BEA issued its revision of the past three years of GDP statistics, and guess what? The fourth quarter of 2007 was revised down to negative growth (-0.2% from the previous 0.6%).

In my view, this process of downward revision of the stats for 2007 and 2008 will continue over the next several years. It takes that long for all the source data to catch up (for example, tax return data for 2008 is not available until mid 2009 or even later). By the time that the data revisions are done, it will be clear that GDP growth in the first half of 2008 was negative, despite what the stats say now.

In other words, I believe that the statistics will eventually show that we are in a recession now, no matter what the official data says now. ...

Comments

[Danny Gamache]

Very interesting.

I personally think that the US recession is an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy amplified by the election.

The media talks all the time about how bad things are, so people stop spending their money, but making the initial comments true - whether or not they were to begin with.

[Michael W. Kruse]

One of the things I still find confounding is the amazing amount of negativity and pessimism I continue to hear from people about all sorts of stuff, yet if you look at most indicators (not just economic) we actually are in pretty healthy situation. Surveys now routinely show people reporting that their own situation is fine but they perceive that everyone else is suffering. (And that is not to say that there are not pockets that are in hard times.) It really is quite amazing.