The Crushing Weight of GDP

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Gross Domestic Product coverage, as you know, is an anvil strapped to The Business Press Maven's back.

And for those keeping score at home? You can now consider me officially crushed beneath its weight.

To paraphrase Churchill -- or, more accurately, to totally butcher a great quote from a great man for my own cheap-shot purposes -- never has one issue done more to needlessly confuse more investors.

But, investors, yesterday was the worst. And you have to be aware so you are not taken in by the incompetence, the idiocy and the tush-covering that is standard business-media practice on the issue.

Bear witness: The Commerce Department on Thursday revised fourth-quarter gross domestic product to 2.5 %, up from 2.2%. This comes three weeks after The Commerce Department revised fourth-quarter gross domestic product down to that weakening (though, of course, temporary) 2.2% from a rip-roaring (though just as temporary) 3.5%.

Sorry, I forgot to warn you to don a neck brace. As you know, I don't fault the Commerce Department for the lurching numbers. It is a government agency -- I'm impressed if they get it right by the third time.

It's the business media, as I've pointed out so many times -- even to the point of writing a mocking limerick when these numbers were originally reported -- that is at fault. Each initial report is taken as if it is a standing fact, with all manner of conclusions drawn from numbers that have the shelf life of heavy cream. This, more than any other misleading misreporting from the miscreants in the business media, confuses investors. Who knows where the economy is if descriptions of where the economy is float on the tide of these numbers?