Justin Fox, Columnist

Don’t Believe That GDP Number. Or Any Other Number.

Several alternative measures of U.S. economic growth indicate that, well, it’s confusing.

August 30, 2018 at 4:28 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.”

Just numbers.
Photographer: Marco Guidi/EyeEm/EyeEm

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Gross domestic product grew at an inflation-adjusted annual pace of 4.2 percent in the second quarter, we learned this week. Great, right? Not so fast:

GDwhat? GDI is gross domestic income, yet another metric of economic activity produced by the GDP estimators at the Bureau of Economic Analysis that’s released with a little more lag time than GDP. That is, the “advance” estimate of second-quarter GDP that was released in late July contained no information on second-quarter GDI. The “second estimate” of GDP that came out Wednesday did.