An example of media hype

[Maggot]

two media outlets, two different takes.

First the Wall street journal:

The American economy is a tremendous engine of prosperity when politicians get out of the way, and for proof look no further than Thursday’s report on fourth-quarter growth. It’s clearer than ever that business investment has rescued the U.S. economy by shifting into a higher gear. Tax reform and deregulation, take a bow.
Growth in the fourth quarter came in higher than expected at 2.6% after a December financial-market scare, and the internals were better than the top line. Consumer spending declined a bit but was still strong. Growth from government spending was negligible—so much for claims of a deficit-led boom in “demand.”

The best news was business investment, which contributed 0.69-percentage points to GDP growth. This is even better than it looks because housing subtracted 0.14. Housing has now been flat or worse for most of the last two years, but that may be a silver lining.

This means the expansion isn’t marked now by ever-rising housing prices, which means growth hasn’t been driven by unsustainable home building. If interest rates don’t keep rising, and assuming the labor market stays strong, the housing market should return to modest growth


Next John Harwood at CNBC:

Trump and GOP promised economic growth much better than Obama's. That's not what happened
President Donald Trump's central claim about his economic policies officially crashed into reality on Thursday.
Throughout the 2016 campaign and since, the president and his party have vowed to kick-start tepid Obama-era economic growth. Specifically, they insisted tax cuts and deregulation would return growth to its post-World War II average of 3 percent — a level, candidate Trump said derisively, that President Barack Obama became "the first president in modern history" never to reach in a single year.
New government data on Thursday morning show that Trump, too, has failed to reach the 3 percent promised land, according to one major metric. [url=https://www.bea.gov/news/2019/initial-gross-domestic-product-4^th-quarter-and-annual-2018]The Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis[/url] measured 2018 growth at 2.9 percent, matching the peak Obama enjoyed in 2015.


More media mayhem Bias.

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