Thread: Critics: GDP fails ‘commonsense sniff test’

NEW YORK - It was a rare bit of stellar economic news. The Commerce Department revised Gross Domestic Product upward last month, saying the broad measure of the economy grew at an annual rate of 3.3 percent for the second quarter, up from an initial estimate of 1.9 percent.
One problem: A vocal group of analysts and economists isn't buying it....
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26627761/

[Notes from a stat geek bird: Assumptions made for calculating economic statistics in usual times often fail in unusual times. For instance, in usual times, one-time write offs are usually due to a single company/crop problem. But not these days. Underlying Assumptions can make an...you know the rest. Unfortunately for numbers like the GDP you will never have all the data you need so you will have to make some assumptions. And even though services are 80% of GDP "spending more" on services data as suggested in the article sounds good except no one has decided a good way to quantify the data yet, so it's hard to tell what data to buy.]