Hat tip to Chicago Exec-MBA-in-the-making Marcos Nogues for bringing this Bloomberg report to my attention.
U.S. fourth-quarter gross domestic product figures may be revised higher by as much as 0.5 percentage point because of an error in Canada's November trade report, economists said.
"If there is a mistake in the tabulation of data by Statistics Canada that was used in the U.S. trade estimates, and that does appear likely at this point, then the correction of that error would have an impact on BEA's estimate of GDP,'' said Ralph Kozlow, associate director for international economics at the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. He didn't specify a figure.
Kozlow didn't specify a figure, but others are more than willing.
Estimates for how much the error will add to U.S. GDP when corrected range from 0.1 percentage points from Morgan Stanley in New York to 0.5 points by Joseph Carson, director of economic research at Alliance Bernstein in New York...
Economist Ted Wieseman of Morgan Stanley projected a 0.1 percent revision, and Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, New York, predicted a gain of about a quarter percentage point.
Marcos had the best line, though: "Those crazy Canadians are stealing our growth!"