Good morning gang! Still traveling but needed to thank everyone for not letting anything happen --"market closed mainly lower but its new uptrend remained undisturbed" (from here). We're good today, metals +0.35% and indexes +0.10%. Cheers!
Posted on 05/20/2015 5:44:30 AM PDT by expat_panama
Economic output (gross domestic product or GDP) showed a mere 0.2 percent growth rate in the first quarter of 2015. Last year, it was even worse, with a 2.1 percent contraction in the first quarter. Both years had especially harsh winters, but many commentators have now noticed that the pattern of weak first quarters has been around for longer -- not just in years with harsh winters. As a result, they are starting to question if the adjustments that the statisticians at the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) make for seasonal effects in their calculations of growth are in fact adequate.
Unfortunately, researchers cannot adequately address the question of whether these numbers are low due to a seasonal adjustment problem because the BEA does not release the underlying not-seasonally adjusted data, nor does it provide details of how they implement the seasonal adjustment to the data. This secretive practice is bizarre and contrasts with other agencies, who are transparent about this crucial aspect of data construction.
Some researchers have attempted to assess the problem by looking for remaining seasonality in the supposedly seasonally adjusted data. Gilbert et al. (2015) test for whether there is a statistically significant remaining seasonal pattern, and find that the evidence is borderline. Rudebus
Good morning gang! Still traveling but needed to thank everyone for not letting anything happen --"market closed mainly lower but its new uptrend remained undisturbed" (from here). We're good today, metals +0.35% and indexes +0.10%. Cheers!
We need to take govt spending out of GDP.
There’s sumpthin goin on round here.
I’ve never seen a reason for seasonal ‘adjustments’.
That’s always had a bad smell to me.
Obama could have gotten away with the lies for a few years and then skated out of town and let the next chump take the blame, but he made the mistake of getting re-elected and now all the lies are catching up to him.
Seasonaly adjusting is fine but they should put the real numbers up along side otherwise it leaves a lot of “fudge” room.
Option THREE: A POTUS problem.
Bingo.
Freedom of Information Act request? What would be their justification for refusing to provide the data?
Maybe Q1 slowdowns are more about folks having spent too much money on Xmas than the weather.
>> Seasonaly adjusting is fine but they should put the real numbers up along side otherwise it leaves a lot of “fudge” room. <<
That would be better. Then non-seasonal ‘seasonal adjustments’ would be visible.
If there are only 2 answers, -either/or-, the premise is defective.
If the data comes from the government then you have 80% BS and the rest are just lies.
OPTION 4: Fedzilla. Gagantuan govt strangling everything it gets its hands on. Every POTUS post-Reagan has been part of the problem.
At first I thought it said “GOP weakness”. Either they are blowing in the wind (weather problem) or they are too old and fat to measure properly.
Hey guys, everything happinin' at once! Claims already came out (up/down/flat) and while metal futures are up (+0.06%) and stock indexes off (-0.16%). See y'all on line (while I'm in the kid's appt).
I wonder if they have stopped to think that there is an endemic weakness in the economy at that point because of previous quarter activity (thinking consumer activity)? The article seems to be headed toward blaming weather or measurement issues, as opposed to recognizing a fundamental characteristic of the data itself (assuming there is one in play).
I’ve never cared for the whole “seasonally adjusted” approach - there is too much opportunity to deliberately mangle the messages in the data.
My confidence in government economic data can best be stated thusly:
Figures lie and liars figure.
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