Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow Slashes Q3 GDP Forecast in Half

The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s GDPNow estimate released today reveals a terrible early forecast for third quarter gross domestic product (GDP) growth. It’s especially bad when compared to Wall Street expectations.

The GDPNow model puts Q3 2015 GDP growth at 0.9% – that’s a 50% drop from just three days ago. The Atlanta Fed explains:

The model’s nowcast for the contribution of net exports to third-quarter real GDP growth fell 0.7 percentage points to -0.9 percentage points on September 29 following the advance report on U.S. international trade in goods from the U.S. Census Bureau.”

What’s most telling about this report is how different the GDPNow forecast is from the “Blue Chip consensus,” which is the expectations of mainstream business economists followed by Wall Street. Check out this chart:

Even the most pessimistic Blue Chip forecasts are significantly above the GDPNow forecast. Wall Street wants to believe the US economy is well above a 2% GDP growth rate in the third quarter, while the Atlanta Fed now places it below 1%.

Of course, Peter Schiff has been warning all year that 2015 would see terrible GDP growth (if any). Peter actually believes that the United States is heading into a recession – if it isn’t in one already. The GDPNow data is just further proof that most of the mainstream financial world is at odds with Peter’s analysis, even if this report from an actual branch of the Fed supports his pessimism towards the US economy.

It’s not even the first time this year that mainstream analysts have ignored the GDPNow forecast. Last Spring, Peter wrote about how everyone ignored the GDPNow forecast for negative Q1 growth. Of course, we now know that the Atlanta Fed’s model was correct, and the market consensus was wrong – Q1 GDP was down 0.2%.

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