Friday, July 29, 2005
Revised GDP Data: "What 2001 Recession?"
The Commerce Department released multi-year revisions to GDP data, and the first thing I looked at was 2001. The rule of thumb is that two negative quarters of GDP is the definition of a recession. I have written many times that there was a chance that the data may show that we had no economic period that fit that definition in 2001. Sure enough, the third quarter of 2001 (page 8), which had been reported as negative, partly from the effects of 9/11, is now positive, a tiny +0.4%.
http://online.wsj.com/documents/bbgdp-20050729.pdf
http://online.wsj.com/documents/bbgdp-20050729.pdf
