Revised real GDP growth
Along with the second quarter GDP report the BEA also published the results of its regular revision of the last five years of data. The most significant revision was to the measure of price changes in the high tech arena. This showed that business investment had been somewhat stronger than previously reported, but it only had a very minor impact on real GDP growth.
The chart shows the year-over-year growth in real GDP over the 2012 to 2017 period with the revised data. I doubt if you will see this data published by the Republicans.
“I doubt if you will see this data published by the Republicans.”
You might see it. It shows that the first 6 Trump quarters are better than the first 6 Obama quarters.
What the chart really shows is that Trump’s bragging about having record breaking economic growth was contradicted as recently as 2014-15 when Obama was president.
Why should anyone believe anything this liar says?
Where did your graph come from? When Imlook at the BEA website, I see a different graph. https://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/gdpnewsrelease.htm
Jerry:
Spencer has always had the ability to construct his own graphs. I believe he has a special service he uses.
The chart you see is the quarter to quarter growth rate at (SAAR) while my chart is the y/y rate from the second quarter of 2017 to the second quarter of 2018.
The data is from the BEA release, Table 2 that you can download.
There are valid reasons to look at both measures. I generally prefer the y/y rate but I also use the q/q. The y/y is much more stable and is not as impacted as much by data revisions. For example, The BEA only had one month of second quarter trade data and made “guesstimates” for the remaining two months. Since trade accounted for some 30% of the second quarter growth we are likely to see very significant revisions to quarterly growth over the next few months. What I really like to use the Q/Q growth is to see if the longer run Y/Y growth is accelerating are slowing. Remember, to calculate the q/q growth rate the simple percentage change is calculated and annualized by raising it to the fourth power — so you can easily understand why even small data changes can generate quite large changes in the annualized growth rates.
Back in the 1970s when I first started following the US economy this first estimate was not released . It was tightly held and was used to help the government data mavens understand the economy better. But it kept being leaked so BEA decided to release it. But it is always subject to large revisions
Ant more questions. I try to be careful not to confuse readers with too much detailed information.
I use excel for most charts and data analysis.
But I do get the data from Haver Analytics and they have programs that make it quick and easy to update old models. I just retired last year. but for 30 years I published a 50 to 150 page publication every month. I could not do that if I had to manually update the data.It was a portfolio strategy product that ran economic models of the relative performance of the S&P industries. My clients were investment managers.