Preliminary 4th Quarter 2006 GDP: 2.2%
Well, there’s a bucket of cold water.
After the 3.5% advance estimate last month, and as Biz Weak noted a couple of weeks ago (link appears to be free for now), the BEA’s release says that the reduction to 2.2% was all due to inventories:
The real change in private inventories subtracted 1.35 percentage points from the fourth-quarter change in real GDP, after adding 0.06 percentage point to the third-quarter change. Private businesses increased inventories $17.3 billion in the fourth quarter, following increases of $55.4 billion in the third quarter and $53.7 billion in the second.
I had thought that the statisticians would find more production resulting from the increased employment in the fourth quarter, but that clearly wasn’t to be. I’m guessing that there may be an upward revision of 0.2% or so in the final release in late March, but that’s about it.
