Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the book here with Catherine Rampel,

who graced us with her presence in the D.C. office. And yet we're down the hall from each other,

and we're not even in the same room. What is this social distancing here?

This is very March 2020.

Yeah, it's like completely empty behind me. It's just this big, vacant, cavernous space.

So anyway, whatever. I don't think that's a metaphor for the bulwark. But we did move into new offices.

Catherine's in D.C. Because logistically, it's a pain in the butt to do this in person.

We are just sitting about 100 feet from each other. We're going to talk about the economy. A couple big headline numbers today. Look, I'm not the guy who knows the number is. That's JVL, but JVL's got a bunch of things he's recording today. So I'm sitting here for JVL. So Catherine's going to educate me. Let's start with GDP. So I saw this morning revisions to GDP went way down.

Now, there's been a bit of theorizing about why it is.

It was revised down to 0.7% growth.

It was an estimator was going to be about 1.4% growth.

Well, below the consensus for that Jones, which is 1.5% growth, I'm throwing a lot of numbers out here,

considerably slower than the 4.4% gain in the prior period. All these numbers always get revised.

First of all, why do they always get revised so much?

Because the government statistical agencies that are collecting these data are getting more and more

data in. So, like, their first shot at GDP numbers, you know, it'll be based on certain information

that they actually have, and then some of it is just imputed.

Like, they're just, they're guessing, basically, some of the key elements that go in.

And then they get more stuff.

And yet we go crazy over the first round of numbers, and we treat it as headline news, knowing very well that it's going to get revised some way.

Yes, that's true.

Noted.

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