How Much Illusion in GDP? What You See Is Not What You Get

``So 2.99% GDP growth annualized, or 0.74% GDP growth not annualized, or 2.3% growth from a year ago... is pretty good for our slow-growth, post-Financial-Crisis, experimental-monetary-policy era, but well within the range of that era, that goes from 5.2% annualized growth in Q3 2014 to a decline of 1.5% in Q1 2011. So nothing special here... [But] after serial revisions, there are now two quarters since the end of the Great Recession when GDP had declined, but the "advance estimates" for both had shown growth...''