Author Archives: James_Hamilton

A worried Econ Watcher

The Bureau of Economic Analysis announced today that seasonally adjusted U.S. real GDP grew at a 2% annual rate in the first quarter. That is below the historical average growth of 3.1% and also below some analysts’ expectations for the Q1 numbers. The new BEA report also revised down the estimate of the Q4 annual growth rate. The latter was originally reported to have been 1.4% but is now estimated to have only been 0.5%.
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This plane has landed safely

The Bureau of Economic Analysis announced today that seasonally adjusted U.S. real GDP grew at a 2.8% annual rate in the third quarter. That’s close to the long-run historical average of 3.1%. With inflation coming down, I think we now can declare that the Fed has achieved the admirable but difficult objective of a “soft landing” — bringing inflation down without tipping the U.S. into recession.
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Chatting about math with ChatGPT

I’m still trying to learn how to use ChatGPT to improve my productivity. One thing I’ve been experimenting with recently is to ask it to check my math. As it turns out, I’m still better at math than the algorithm. Here is a link to a recent discussion I had with ChatGPT. My entries are the short strongly indented statements. In this little conversation, ChatGPT made six separate math errors. Each time it confidently asserted something to be true when in fact it was provably false, and each time it would cheerfully admit its error when I pointed it out.

My recommendation is to keep ChatGPT on a short leash. Don’t ask it anything you can’t directly confirm yourself.

Almost landed

The Bureau of Economic Analysis announced today that seasonally adjusted U.S. real GDP grew at a 1.6% annual rate in the first quarter. That’s a little lower than many analysts expected. But the year-over-year growth is still on track.

Top panel: quarterly real GDP growth at an annual rate, 1947:Q2-2024:Q1, with the historical average (3.1%) in blue. Calculated as 400 times the difference in the natural log of real GDP from the previous quarter. Bottom panel: year-over-year growth rate. Calculated as 100 times the difference in the natural log of real GDP from the same quarter of the previous year.

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