Courtesy of Mish.
In January, I noted the Census Bureau had construction spending errors going back a decade. Since construction spending directly feeds BEA GDP numbers, GDP will be revised as well.
On July 29, the BEA will post revisions for years 2013 through 2015. Other years will follow. How big will the revisions be?
Breitbart claims to know. Do they?
Breitbart reports Obama Administration to Revise Total GDP Growth Down 2%
The Department’s Bureau of Economic Statistics (BEA) regularly makes small revisions to its published statistics as more information becomes available over time. But in a massively large adjustment, the BEA just revised downward — by $346 billion — the real (after-inflation) GDP for 50 states and the District of Columbia, covering the 11-year period from 2005 through the end of 2015.
According to BEA’s newest data, real GDP was overstated by about $125 billion from 2007 through 2008, during the period leading into the start of the Great Recession. But the overstatement shrank to about $70 billion in 2009.
During 2012 and 2013, when the U.S. economy had what some have referred to as a micro-recession, the overstatement of real GDP growth ballooned to about $275 billion. Despite over $100 billion in revisions to real GDP growth in 2014 and 2015, the overstatement continued to grow to $324 billion, or 2 percent of GDP.
Links Head Nowhere
Not a single Breitbart link heads to any BEA discussion of revisions.
Since they don’t (and I would be happy to report a correction), I am guessing, they are guessing.
From the May BEA article on “GDP and the Economy” we see …
