That Big GDP Number Won’t Be as Big as It Sounds
A guide to understanding annualized quarterly economic growth percentages, which are reaching new depths and heights this year.
Deceptively strong.
Photographer: MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images
The third-quarter gross domestic product number is coming out Thursday morning, and it’s going to be huge. The median of the economic forecasts collected by Bloomberg calls for a 29.9% annualized real GDP gain.
This would be the biggest quarterly GDP gain on record, with the previous high of 16.7% set in the fourth quarter of 1949. Quarterly GDP data are only available back to 1947, and it seems likely going by the annual data (which are available back to 1929) that there were several quarters during World War II with annualized growth of 30% or more. Still, 29.9% would be a big deal.