Economy

Pre-Covid, it was interesting to compare the Nowcast and GDPNow numbers - they were often quite a bit different even though they are both data driven models predicting the same metric.

For example (from the final two updated Nowcast quarters):

Quarter   Nowcast   GDPNow   BEA(adv)   BEA(last)
2021Q1       6.66         7.87           6.4             6.3
2021Q2       3.12         6.43           6.5             6.7
Average       4.89         7.15           6.45           6.5


Which just goes to show that this is not an exact science - even the BEA's final, revised numbers are estimates.