Tomorrow, April 30, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Statistics will release the U.S. gross domestic product numbers for the first quarter of 2025. And the really bad news is that the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow, a running estimate of real GDP growth based on available economic data for the current measured quarter, is pointing to a drop of 2.7 percent. Not great, Bob!
The GDPNow estimate could be wrong, of course. The Atlanta Fed notes that the range from the most optimistic and pessimistic ten forecasts is from growth a bit higher than 1 percent to a decline of just under 1 percent.
For a long time, the conventional definition of a recession was two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. And then it happened under Joe Biden in 2022, and every left-of-center economist and elected official suddenly insisted that two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth really didn’t count as a recession.
Either way, you’d rather see the GDP going up than going down, and tomorrow’s number, covering the first three months of the year, is probably going to be bad, creating at least one grim news cycle for the Trump administration and strengthening the arguments of those who contend that the tariffs and trade war are hurting the U.S. economy. (Yes, the first 20 days of the past quarter are Biden’s presidency, but that’s not really going to get Trump off the hook for bad numbers.)