GDPNow Vs Nowcast: Bit Of Convergence But Inventory Problem Looms

The Atlanta Fed GDPNow forecast came out yesterday, the New York Fed Nowcast today.

The GDPNow Forecast and the FRNBNY Nowcast GDP forecasts for the first quarter took a leap towards convergence with the former rising and the latter falling this week.

Nowcast Latest Forecast: 2.7 Percent – March 30, 2018

The New York Fed Staff Nowcast stands at 2.7% for 2018:Q1 and 2.9% for 2018:Q2.

News from this week’s data releases decreased the nowcast for 2018:Q1 by 0.2 percentage point and decreased the nowcast for 2018:Q2 by 0.1 percentage point.

A negative surprise from personal consumption expenditures accounted for most of the decrease.

It’s interesting to watch these models react in opposite ways to the same data. One rose .06 percentage points the other declined 0.2 percentage points.

?The GDPNow forecast jumped 0.6% on Thursday, but 0.5 percentage points was an inventory adjustment.

GDPNow Latest Forecast: 2.4 Percent – March 29, 2018

The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the first quarter of 2018 is 2.4 percent on March 29, up from 1.8 percent on March 23.

The forecast of the contribution of inventory investment to first-quarter real GDP growth increased from 0.66 percentage points to 1.21 percentage points after yesterday’s advance releases of wholesale and retail inventories by the U.S. Census Bureau, yesterday’s GDP release by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), and this morning’s release of the revised underlying detail tables for the National Income and Product Accounts by the BEA.

The GDPNow assessment of real final sales, the bottom-line measure of the economy, is only 1.2%, up 0.1 percentage points from a week ago.

Advance Economic Indicators

On Wednesday, the Census Department posted Advance Reports (preliminary) on U.S. International Trade in Goods, Wholesale Inventories and Retail Inventories.