Not surprisingly, the U.S. real GDP growth rate came in negative for 2009 II.
Today’s report of –1.0% grades out as an F on both my preferred grade scale and my grade inflated college student grade scale.
N.B. Reporters are emphasizing the bit of trivia that this is the first time real GDP has declined for 4 straight quarters since records were started 60 years ago. That isn’t quite true. This has happened a few times in the initial announcements. But every decade or so the government does a major revision of how GDP is calculated, goes back and recalculates all the announced values from the past, and then prints those re-revisions in all of its publications. So, we are comparing apples to oranges: without digging the original releases out of a government documents repository (or the the file cabinets of middle-aged macroeconomists like me) to compare with the current original releases, this is just the sort of “record” that should have a big asterisk by it.
