Justin Fox, Columnist

A Requiem for the Obama-Trump Economy

The last pre-coronavirus GDP report shows economic growth rates under Trump were … pretty similar to those under Obama.

March 30, 2020 at 10:30 AM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Let’s have a moment of silence for the boom.
Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

Last Thursday morning, just as the initial unemployment claims report was making history, the Bureau of Economic Analysis at the Commerce Department released its third estimate of gross domestic product for the fourth quarter and full year 2019 to an understandably uncaring world.

This is what used to be called the “final” estimate (complete with scare quotes), but U.S. GDP numbers are never final. The annual update of the past five years of data will be released in July, and there will be many revisions after that. Still, the data released last week do provide the best portrait yet of economic growth Before Coronavirus, including an important data point missing from the first two estimates of fourth-quarter GDP: gross domestic income.