Maven: Haunted by Poor Reporting on GDP

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Oh, how it grieves The Business Press Maven to see the business media mislead investors again and again and again on gross domestic product numbers.

Trust me, it's scarring to have to go through this once more.

But in order that your perceptions are not undermined on these third-quarter numbers by such an obvious disregard for history, I will suffer through it again.

But business media, heed my warning: If you keep making this mistake, I will reach into my arsenal of awards for idiocy and pull out something that will make you cry and wish you had become English professors.

You want the public to trust you? How about, as a modest little start, earning that trust?

The Commerce Department reported Friday that the economy expanded at a 1.6% rate during the third quarter.

That's only a preliminary number, right? And, as I've shown you time and again, it is often revised, right?

Well, from Reuters to Alan Abelson, the Barron's columnist who has predicted 24 of the last three recessions and spoke this weekend of the "really punk showing of the economy," referring to these numbers -- which might as well have been written in disappearing ink -- you never would have known that.

All we heard from these news outlets and more was that the economy expanded at a 1.6% rate, below analysts' consensus of 2.2%.

And then we got an entire weekend's worth of worthless articles about what this means.

They are worthless because the originally reported numbers often don't hold.