Over the course of two months, with economic and market cheerleaders in a tizzy about how we’re exploding to the upside, the best GDP forecasting model I know of has dropped its estimate from a high of 5.4% to just under 2%.
The Atlanta Fed didn’t change its forecast based on hope or some grand idea of what could happen. The analysts at the central bank used hard data.
If something doesn’t change significantly in the next few weeks, we should expect first-quarter GDP of about 2%, well below the rosy forecasts from Washington and Wall Street.
