Five or six times each month, the Atlanta Fed posts a "nowcast" of real gross domestic product (GDP) growth from the Atlanta Fed's GDPNow model. The most recent model nowcast for first-quarter real GDP growth is provided in table 1 below alongside alternative forecasts from the Philadelphia Fed's quarterly Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) and the CNBC/Moody's Analytics Rapid Update survey. The Atlanta Fed's nowcast of 1.2 percent growth is considerably lower than both the SPF forecast (2.7 percent) and the Rapid Update forecast (2.6 percent).
Why the discrepancy? The less frequently updated SPF forecast (now nearly a month old) has the advantage of including forecasts of major subcomponents of GDP. Comparing the subcomponent forecasts from the SPF with those from the GDPNow model reveals that no single factor explains the difference between the two GDP forecasts. The GDPNow model forecasts of the real growth rates of consumer spending, residential investment, and government spending are all somewhat weaker than the SPF forecasts. Together these subcomponents account for just under 1.0 percentage point of the 1.5 percentage point difference between the GDP growth forecasts.
Most of the remaining difference in the GDP forecasts is the result of the different forecasts for real business fixed investment (BFI) growth. The GDPNow model projects a sharp 13.5 percent falloff in nonresidential structures investment that largely offsets the reasonably strong increases in the other two subcomponents of BFI. Much of this decline is due to petroleum and natural gas well exploration; a component which accounts for almost 30 percent of nonresidential structures investment and looks like it will fall sharply this quarter. The remainder of this blog entry "drills" down into this portion of the nonresidential structures forecast (pun intended). (A related recent analysis using the GDPNow model has been done here).
A December macroblog post I coauthored with Atlanta Fed research director Dave Altig presented some statistical evidence that in the past, large declines in oil prices have had a pronounced negative effect on oil and mining investment. Chart 1 below shows that history appears to be repeating itself.
The Baker Hughes weekly series on active rotary rigs for oil and natural gas wells has plummeted from 1,929 for the week ending November 21 to 1,267 for the week ending February 27. The Baker Hughes data are the monthly source series for drilling oil and gas wells industrial production (IP) and one of the two quarterly source series for the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis's (BEA) estimate of drilling investment (for example, petroleum and natural gas exploration and wells). The other source series for drilling investment is footage drilled completions from the American Petroleum Institute, released about a week before the BEA publishes its initial estimate of GDP.
Chart 2 displays three of these indicators of drilling activity. The data are plotted in logarithms so that one-quarter changes approximate quarterly growth rates. The chart makes clear that the changes in each of the three series are highly correlated, suggesting that the Baker Hughes rig count can be used to forecast the other series. The Baker Hughes data end on February 27, and we can (perhaps conservatively) extrapolate it forward by assuming it remains at its last reading of 1,267 active rigs through the end of the quarter. We can then use a simple regression to forecast the February and March readings of drilling oil and gas wells IP. Another simple regression with the IP drilling series and its first-quarter forecast allows us to project first-quarter real drilling investment. The forecasts, shown as dashed lines in chart 2, imply real drilling investment will decline at an annual rate of 52 percent in the first quarter. This decline is steeper than the current GDPNow model forecast of a 36 percent decline as the latter does not account for the decline in active rotary rigs in February.
A 52 percent decline in real nonresidential investment in drilling would likely subtract about 0.5 percentage point off of first-quarter real GDP growth. However, it's important to keep in mind that a lot of first quarter source data for GDP are not yet available. In particular, almost none of the source data for the volatile net exports and inventory investment GDP subcomponents have been released. So considerable uncertainty still surrounds real GDP growth this quarter.
By Pat Higgins, a senior economist in the Atlanta Fed's research department