“You’re All $500 Billion Richer Now According to Biden Administrator’s Revised Spreadsheet” (9/27/2024). I will not separate the non-controversies from the article. I’ll just note that the annual GDP update has brought the GDP series more in line with the Philadelphia Fed’s output tracking, in its Coincident Index.
Figure 1: Coincident Index (blue), ex-GDP update (tan), post-GDP update, GDPNow as of 9/27 (red square), all in log 2019Q4=0. Note that the Q3 coincident index is based on the average of July and August – that’s why it assumes zero growth in September. The NBER has defined recession days as shaded in 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”, namely:
…as a timely and very important data “update” has come in time to stop the fast-rising narrative of recession, we can pretend – if only a few months until the election – that US consumers and households are actually real. healthy, even if it is said to be healthy it is completely made up and the result of a mouse click… and nothing more.
If the conspirators have so much power, you have to wonder why they didn’t use the original benchmark again…(although see EJ Antoni on the assertion that the BLS was deliberately inflating the initial employment release).
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