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posted by martyb on Monday May 25 2015, @04:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the draw-graph-and-then-plot-points dept.

Bloomberg reports:

The way some parts of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) are calculated are about to change in the wake of the debate over persistently depressed first-quarter growth.

In a blog post published Friday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis listed a series of alterations it will make in seasonally adjusting data used to calculate economic growth. The changes will be implemented with the release of the initial second-quarter GDP estimate on July 30, the BEA said.

Although the agency adjusts its figures for seasonal variations, growth in any given first quarter still tends to be weaker than in the remaining three, economists have found, a sign there may be some bias in the data. It's a phenomenon economists call "residual seasonality."

ZeroHedge reports:

In other words, as of July 30, the Q1 GDP which will have seen its final print at -1% or worse, will be revised to roughly +1.8%, just to give the Fed the "credibility" to proceed with a September rate hike which means we can now safely assume not even the Fed will launch a "hiking cycle" at a time when the first half GDP will print negative (assuming the Atlanta Fed's 0.7% Q2 GDP estimate is even modestly accurate).

Will abnormally "good" data be revised lower, or whether labor market data, which is already manipulated beyond comparison by the BLS will also be adjusted due to "residual seasonality"? Don't hold your breath.

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Monday May 25 2015, @12:08PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 25 2015, @12:08PM (#187580)

    My analysis of ZH is its kind of like that old saying about democracy, it really sucks but all the alternatives are even worse.

    The alternatives are a handful of megacorporation owned, corporate advertiser supported, government boot licking propaganda outlets that are so shameless they'd embarrass a Pravda editor from the 80s, which starts making ZH ravings and rantings look much better.

    Another way to put it, is ZH looks like shite, and it takes a lot of work but the Times and the fedgov and CNBC do a lot of work to make ZH look comparatively better. I mean, you just can't take mainstream stuff seriously anymore, or if you do, its a recipe to lose your shirt in the markets.

    A large part of it is the corruption of the existing system. Naturally thats going to lower the bar until almost anything is better on average, so some of the ZH stuff is pretty stinky; yet simultaneously less stinky than the alternative.

    Or yet another way to put it is probably 50% of it is crap but its competing in a market where the standard is 90% crap.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday May 25 2015, @06:10PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 25 2015, @06:10PM (#187671)

    Here's a great quote of two paragraphs from one ZH post today toward the end of a post discussing two recent stupid movie releases:

    Memorial Day is a dreary moment to have to face this onrushing calamity of rocket-propelled medievalism rampant — all those poor American soldiers blown up and mangled the past twelve years. It’s also interesting that the news media is totally out-of-touch with the biggest prize on the great gameboard: Saudi Arabia. You think ISIS overrunning Iraq is bad news? Wait until the ordnance starts flying around Riyadh. Notice, too, that there’s no news coming out of Yemen on the base of the Arabian peninsula, a failed state with a population nearly equal to its neighbor. If we have any idea what’s going on there — and surely the Pentagon and NSA do — then it’s not for popular consumption.

    This is ironic because if the trouble happens to spread into Saudi Arabia — and I don’t see how it will not — then we’ll find out in a New York minute how America’s future is not about monster trucks, cars, dirt bikes, holograms, phone apps, and all the other ridiculous preoccupations of the moment.