GDP Printed 3.4 Against Nine Consensus Readings. The Last Advance Estimate Was Revised 0.7 Points.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis says real GDP rose at an annual rate of 3.4 per cent in the third quarter.
Twelve hours earlier this desk published the four consensus readings it had found — blank, 3.0, 3.2 and 3.43 — and called the 0.43-point spread a problem. Five more have since turned up: nine readings in all, and 3.2 is carried by five of them. Ranked against the issuer, 3.43 missed by three hundredths and the modal 3.2 missed by two tenths, so the reading whose false precision looked like a scraping artefact was the only one inside a tenth. The Atlanta Fed's nowcast at 3.3 also beat every published market expectation except the unrounded one; the New York Fed's stood at 2.7. Then the detail that undoes all of it: the agreed 2.2 prior for the second quarter was itself an advance estimate of 1.5, revised up seven tenths on 30 September. We have ranked nine forecasts to within three hundredths of a number that moved seven tenths last time it was measured, so do not resolve a forecast dispute at the advance print. Separately, yesterday's claim that three "core PCE" fields were three different objects is now a claim about prints: 0.3 on the month, 2.5 annualised on the quarter against a 2.40 consensus, 3.1 on the year — and the headline did the same at 0.5, 2.1 and 3.6. The quarterly headline price index was the day's biggest miss, printing 2.1 against consensus readings of 3.4 and 2.6, and the 3.4 is anchored to the row by a 5.0 prior the Bureau confirms. Claims printed 194,000; four separate vendor disagreements are about priors, which cannot move.