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355 points Aloisius | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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Aloisius ◴[] No.44390494[source]
I'm a bit confused about the bit about the "Imports expanded 37.9%, fastest since 2020, and pushed GDP down by nearly 4.7 percentage points" bit.

Presumably when they calculated GDP previously, they hadn't seen quite as much imports, but had seen higher spending, thus they misattributed some of it to domestic products rather than imports, though I'm a bit confused as to how they underestimated imports given everything is declared. Perhaps some changes in the price index?

Though other articles talk about the expected GDP next quarter being higher because they don't expect a surge of imports to continue, which makes no sense to me unless one assumes spending remains the same with or without imports.

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ACow_Adonis ◴[] No.44392093[source]
See this article: Why do econ journalists keep making this basic mistake.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-do-econ-journalists-keep-m...

Source: am economist, and the writer of the blog is 100% correct.

Reporting and commentary on GDP and economics stats is just generally bad.

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1. neilwilson ◴[] No.44393987[source]
However Economists tend to struggle with flow effects, and Noah is no exception.

Trade deficits are exports of money as static savings, and that reduces money in flow within the USD currency area. Deliberately, as that is how neo-mercantalism operates. The impact is on the income/expenditure sequence, not the aggregate figures - which are massaged by the reporting currency effect.