Category Archives: recession

Nowcast Errors – Atlanta vs. St. Louis

Reader Steven Kopits seems to think the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow is the only nowcast of relevance. There are actually quite a few, from the tracking GDPs from consulting firms (e.g., IHS Markit formerly Macroeconomic Advisers) to Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, etc. However, for illustrative purposes, here is an easy to do comparison (since the data are at FRED) for nowcasts just before the advance release.

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A Depressed Growth Trajectory: The Wall Street Journal July Survey

Forecasters are downbeat relative April survey (Figure 1).  And about a third forecast negative Q/Q growth in 2022Q2, but the mean (and median) forecast is for positive growth, as shown in Figure 2 (though there being two consecutive quarters of negative growth are not central to determining whether NBER BCDC declares a recession). About a fifth of respondents predict at least two consecutive quarters of negative growth starting later in 2022-23.

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