The Big Picture | GDP: Negative 0.3%: “GDP was negative in Q3 — worst quarter since Q3 2001 — and the headline number doesn’t even do the extent of the contraction justice:
‘Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — decreased at an annual rate of 0.3 percent in the third quarter of 2008, (that is, from the second quarter to the third quarter), according to advance estimates released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the second quarter, real GDP increased 2.8 percent.
The decrease in real GDP in the third quarter primarily reflected negative contributions from personal consumption expenditures (PCE), residential fixed investment, and equipment and software that were largely offset by positive contributions from federal government spending, exports, private inventory investment, nonresidential structures, and state and local government spending. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, decreased.’
Thank goodness for Federal, State and Local government spending, and for exports:
Real personal consumption expenditures: -3.1%
Durable goods -14.1%
Nondurable goods -6.4%
Services expenditures 0.6%”