Back on March 27, I picked a bone or two with some cheerier-than-warranted economic headlines like:

In Housing and Other Big-Ticket Markets, Early Stirrings of Hope
Economic signs point to sustainable recovery
Surprise rebound for U.S. goods orders and new homes

One of the numbers that had been cited in the optimistic headlines was a modest improvement in the number of new orders for durable goods. I wrote, then:

On the durable-goods figure, we have to look closely at the adjusted number from the previous month. In February, the Census Bureau thought January’s new orders had declined 5.2 percent. But in March, with more data, they concluded January was much worse than their initial estimate, with new orders declining 7.3 percent. The recent headlines about durable goods increasing 3.4 percent is February’s intial estimate compared to that revised January number.
If you compare the initial number of orders for January to the initial number of orders for February, you get a 1.09 percent increase, a much more modest number. And February’s 3.4 percent increase that is generating today’s happier headlines could be revised down, a month from now, to point where it barely represents an increase at all.

Here we are, a month later, and guess what? “That February increase was revised way down, to 2.1% instead of the originally reported 3.5% increase.”

January’s revised numbers were 2.1 percentage points worse than the initial estimate; February’s revised numbers were 1.4 percentage points worse than the initial estimate. March’s initial number is down again, dropping 0.8 percent, but hey, we’ll see in a month whether it, too, is revised downward.

But hey, Gallup assures me that “In the eyes of Americans, Obama’s top achievement to date involves the U.S. economy — whether the economic stimulus plan and industry bailouts, specifically, or improvement to the economy, generally.”