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Strategies & Market Trends : Heinz Blasnik- Views You Can Use -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SOROS who wrote (3683)	11/5/2003 9:06:49 AM
From: zonder	Respond to of 4913

This is not to claim that all numbers declared by the US government are God's honest truth... However, the author's claim that the recently announced 7.2% GDP growth figure does not compute from the GDP figures in that spreadsheet is based solely on his lack of understanding of how that number is calculated. Out of the goodness of my heart, I will teach you the error of his ways :-) (1) You have erased the wrong columns. GDP growth is calculated from "Billions of chained (1996) dollars", not from "Billions of dollars". There is good reason for this which I will not go into now but leave for the student to research in his own time :-) (2) 7.2% is an ANNUALIZED QUARTERLY CHANGE. That is, it is what would be the annual growth if the US economy were to grow at this rate for four quarters. It is hence calculated in the following manner (on Table 3): ...(a) Quarterly growth = (3Q03 GDP/2Q03 GDP)-1 = (9,797.2/9,629.4)-1 = 1.7% ...(b) ANNUALIZED GDP growth = (1+1.7%^4)-1 = 7.2% I hope this helps. I have pressing engagements now and have to go, but we can continue this at another time, if you would care to find out about the other errors in the text that you have posted.