GDP, GDO, GDP+ and Final Sales

With Q4 3rd release, we have an estimate of GDO, in addition to GDP.

Figure 1: top panel, GDP (blue), GDO (green), GDP+ (tan), all in bn.Ch.2017$, SAAR. Note GDP+ is based on level of GDP in 2019Q4, GDPNow as of 3/29 (sky blue square). bottom panel; final sales (blue, left scale), final sales to private domestic purchasers (tan, scale), all in bn.Ch.2017$, SAAR. Source: BEA 2023Q4 3rd release, Philadelphia Fed, Atlanta Fed, and author’s calculations.

GDP growth is 3.4% (SAAR), GDO is 4.1%, and final sales to private domestic purchasers — often taken to be the best predictor of aggregate demand — is 3.3%. GDPNow for 2024Q1 is 2.3%, while the nowcast of the NY Fed is  1.9% (both as of 3/29).

 

 

6 thoughts on “GDP, GDO, GDP+ and Final Sales”

  2. Macroduck

    I took a look at contributions to GDP in this new data. I noticed the oddest thing – when borrowing costs fall, the contribution of investment to output tends to rise:

    https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1jiUu

    It’s true for both residential and non-residential fixed investment. I say this is odd because we have so often been told in comments here that interest rates don’t matter to investment. But there it is, in the data; when rates fall, investment rises. Plain as day.

    1. pgl

      Check out the “Arrogance of Ignorance” post. Yea – Jonny boy went way too far and has been taken out to the wood shed.

      1. Moses Herzog

        Remember the “old school” principals and gym teachers that would put the holes in the thick paddles and had it hanging up on a nail on the wall for exhibit?? Almost make the Asian “Tiger Mom” look timid.

  3. Ithaqua

    Let me try! Let me try!

    You have the causality backwards – when contribution of investment to output tends to rise, borrowing costs fall – it’s one of those “automatic stabilizers” that I keep reading about somewhere – so as to increase the profits of the rich and keep the poor desperate for jobs. Lower borrowing costs mean poor people are worse off, because (as is well known) their portfolios are mainly in bonds, so their rate of return goes down, but rich people’s portfolios are in stocks, which go up as, uh, middle-class people move out of bonds and into stocks. Something else incoherent goes here. And that’s why Big Business and the U.S. government support Ukraine’s war against Russia, which you will notice started when bond yields started to increase, more or less.

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