GDP printed at 2.6 percent Thursday morning, just slightly above the consensus estimate of 2.4 percent. I had estimated the GDP to print at 2 percent, plus or minus 0.5 percent in my September jobs report.
As we predicted, the current positive report is largely attributable to a reversal of an anomaly with imports clearing the ports that we saw in 2022Q1 and Q2. That anomaly cleared in 2022Q3, so that net exports (NEX), which are a deduction from GDP became an addition to GDP because a reduction in imports caused the figure to go positive (subtracting a negative yields a positive.)
The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) print turned the economy from a technical recession, which most analysts accept as the two consecutive quarters of negative growth we saw in 2022Q1 and Q2, into growth….