What's Up With The GDP?

GDP increased 3.8% the BEA reported recently. Or did it? Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture thinks it doesn't quite have that new car smell.

Add this to the old debate on what the real unemployment number is and what the real rate of inflation is and pretty soon you begin to figure out what happened to all those imaginative Dungeons and Dragons enthusiasts you went to high school with: they became economists. Now they spin the fantastical tale that propels our lurching, decaying economy forwards towards its inevitable collapse. Somewhere along the way we traded a strong industrial economy for one fueled largely by myth and Greenspeak.

Too bad, I miss the old New economy.