Justin Fox, Columnist

Oil's Plunge Won't Drag Down the U.S. Economy

Energy didn't contribute all that much to growth.

January 29, 2016 at 10:22 PM 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.”

Not causing a recession.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

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U.S. real gross domestic product grew at a 0.7 percent annualized pace in the fourth quarter of 2015, the government announced today.

Now, forget that number. It is the “advance estimate,” and the Bureau of Economic Analysis will revise it again and again over the coming months and years. These revisions tend to be especially big at points where the economy tips from growth into recession, or vice versa. Consider what happened to GDP growth estimates for the first quarter of 2008, which turned out to be the beginning of the Great Recession.