Check Out How Banks Have Slashed GDP Estimates In The Past Few Days
"Alongside the weaker-than-expected print in January, downward revisions to core retail sales growth in December (to 0.1% month-over-month from 0.7%) and November (to 0.1% from 0.4%) suggest notably softer growth in Q4 consumption than initially estimated," says Peter Newland, an economist at Barclays.
"This subtracted 0.4 percentage points from our tracking estimate, which now stands at 2.2%, a full percentage point below the first official release."
Table 1 shows how the Barclays economics team's Q4 2013 GDP tracking estimate has fallen in recent days. December U.S. trade data revealed a wider deficit than expected, taking the estimate down to 2.8% from 3.2%. December wholesale inventories growth was below expectations as well, whittling down the estimate by another 0.2 percentage points, and today's retail sales release saw it cut another 0.4 percentage points to 2.2%.
"Our Q1 GDP estimate is currently 1.6%, down from our previous estimate of 2.6%," says Credit Suisse chief economist Neal Soss.
"The revision reflects recent soft employment and PMI data, bad weather, and lower assumptions for inventory building. This morning's retail sales figures were also much weaker than expected, and lowered our baseline estimates further."
Paul Dales, a senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics, says today's retail sales release "gets the first quarter off to a slow start."
"Some of the weakness is probably due to the unusually severe weather," says Dales.
"But even after pencilling in strong spending on heating and a rebound in retail sales in February and March, first-quarter annualised consumption growth may be between 2.0% and 2.5%. That would be down from just over 3% in the fourth quarter."