“You Are All $500 Billion Richer Now According To A Revised Biden Admin Spreadsheet” (9/27/2024). I won’t dissect the non-arguments in the article. I’ll just observe that the GDP annual update has brought the GDP series much more in line with the Philadelphia Fed’s tracking of output, in its Coincident Index.
Figure 1: Coincident Index (blue), GDP pre-update (tan), GDP post-update, GDPNow as of 9/27 (red square), all in logs 2019Q4=0. Note that Q3 coincident index is based on average of July and August – hence assumes zero growth in September. NBER defined peak-to-trough recession dates shaded gray. Source: BEA, Philadelphia Fed, Atlanta Fed, NBER, and author’s calculations.
In other words, according to Zerohedge, it’s all a conspiracy to hide the “truth”, viz.:
…now that a perfectly timed and very strategic data “revision” has come in just in time to drown out the rapidly rising recession narrative, we can pretend – if only for a few months until the election – that US consumer and households are actually quite healthy, even if said healthy is totally fabricated and the result of a mouse click… and nothing else.
If the conspirators are so all-powerful, you’ve gotta wonder why they didn’t manipulate the preliminary benchmark as well…(although see EJ Antoni on the assertion that BLS was deliberately tweaking upward preliminary employment releases).
