In May 2008, the blog aligned itself with Harvard’s Prof Martin Feldstein, who declared that the Q1 2008 US GDP report was “grossly misleading“. Feldstein, after all, was in a position to know, as he was then chairman of the official body that decides whether the US is in recession.
15 months later, the US Commerce Department has finally admitted that Feldstein was right. It has revealed that “the first 12 months of the US recession saw the economy shrink more than twice as much as previously estimated”.
The blog learnt long ago that if something seems “too good to be true”, then it probably is. It awards itself a pat on the back for not falling into this trap on the US GDP numbers.