U.S. GDP And Slow Growth

U.S. GDP And Slow Growth by Brad McMillan, Commonwealth Financial Network

As you may remember, the original estimate for first-quarter U.S. GDP growth was a none-too-exciting 0.2 percent. Today’s revision reduced that to a downright depressing decline of 0.7 percent.

In this light, the slow growth problem I mentioned yesterday sounds optimistic, right?

Today’s number is, in fact, representative of problems in the data, but not in the obvious way. To understand why, let’s look first at the following chart from the Federal Reserve, which shows quarterly changes on an annualized basis.

We see that growth has bounced around quite a bit over the past 10 years, but...