Paula Dwyer , Columnist

Good News Lurks Beneath the Bad GDP Number

January 30, 2013 at 5:27 PM UTC

Paula Dwyer is a senior editor with the New York editing hub, focusing on daily and long-form enterprise. She was London bureau chief for Businessweek and Washington economics editor for the New York Times, and is a co-author of “Take on the Street: How to Fight for Your Financial Future.

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Calm down. Yes, the U.S. economy surprisingly shrank in the fourth quarter at a 0.1 percent annual rate, weaker than any economist had forecast in a Bloomberg survey. As measured by gross domestic product, the volume of all goods and services produced, economic output was the lowest since the second quarter of 2009.

The median forecast of 83 economists surveyed by Bloomberg called for a 1.1 percent gain in GDP. For all of 2012, the economy expanded just 2.2 percent, a small improvement over 2011's anemic rate of 1.8 percent.