The U.S. economy expanded less than forecast in the first quarter as a smaller contribution from inventories overshadowed the biggest gain in consumer spending in more than a year.
Gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services produced in the U.S., rose at a 2.2 percent annual rate after a 3 percent pace, Commerce Department figures showed today in Washington. The median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News called for a 2.5 percent rise. Household purchases increased 2.9 percent, exceeding the most optimistic projection. Homebuilding grew the fastest in almost two years
So there you have it... a VERY strong (perhaps unsustainable?) contribution from consumption, reduced impact from inventories, the beginning of contribution from residential investment for years to come (after years of decline), mixed trade, and what is likely to be negative impact from the government sector for years.
Source: BEA
From the Consumer Metrics Institute, a great comment about how this inflation-adjusted number is derived from the nominal data. You knew that the government has multiple mostly-compatible but different inflation measures, each of which is biased slowly over time in a way that is useful to the area of government generating the inflation measure, right? I'm not trying to be conspiracy theorist, but I'd like a single inflation measure applied to similar things...
ReplyDelete"Once again the BEA has used "deflaters" that will strain the credibility of the public, especially if they buy gasoline. To correct the "nominal" data into "real" numbers the BEA assumed that the annualized inflation rate during 1Q-2012 was 1.54%. As a reminder, lower "deflaters" cause the reported "real" growth rates to increase -- and once again very low seasonally adjusted BEA inflation "deflaters" have been the headline number's best friend. If the raw "nominal" numbers were instead "deflated" by using the seasonally corrected CPI-U calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for the same time period, nearly the entire headline growth rate vanishes -- and the resulting growth rate would have been a minuscule 0.08% with "real final sales" contracting."
I tried to break down how the deflator was computer back in 2008:
ReplyDeletehttp://tinyurl.com/bsc3b5x
Thanks for the post - where is the data that breaks down the 'new' consumption by socioeconomic and demographic data?
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