Things Were Worse in the Fourth Quarter than We Had Thought...
An email from Macroeconomic Advisors:
Q4-2008 Past-Quarter GDP Tracking -5.5 percent: Both exports and imports were weaker than BEA's assumptions in the fourth quarter, but exports much more so. This suggests much lower net exports in the fourth quarter. Therefore, we lowered our tracking estimate of fourth-quarter GDP growth by seven-tenths to a 5.5% rate of decline...
The implications for those counseling inaction right now--those who think (a) we don't need a fiscal boost, and (b) the fiscal boost should be postponed until Cass Sunstein and Jeff Liebman can do their cost-benefit analyses and then convince the members of congress to listen to them--are left as an exercise for the reader.
