The Lost Decade

The government revised the GDP growth number for Q2 today and it wasn’t good. Instead of growing by 2.4% which the original report said, the economy grew by just 1.6% for the second three months of the year.
As bad as that sounds, Wall Street was expecting even worse. The consensus was to expect 1.3%. Thanks to that “good news,” it looks like stocks are ready to open higher.
The 1.6% growth rate also matches what the U.S. economy has done over the last ten years. There’s talk of us having a lost decade; we’ve already had one!
Here’s a look at the annualized GDP growth rate over the preceding 10 years:

Since Q2 of 2000, the economy has averaged 1.6% a year which is less than half the growth rate of the preceding 10 years.

Posted by Eddy Elfenbein on August 27th, 2010 at 9:03 am

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