If my memory serves me right, the public (us guys) were not informed that there was actually negative growth in 01 until July-Aug of 02, about 12 months later.
There's revision information contained in the
GDP News release from the BEA. It's about a quarter of the way down the page.
According to the press release, what the BEA categorizes as the "final" numbers for Q3 have a 66% probablity of being within -0.6 to +0.9 points of the number in the release (3.1%), and a 90% probablity of being within -1.0 to +1.3 points.
So, using the 90% confidence numbers, the 3.1% number could actually be as low as 2.1% or as high as 4.4%.
Yeah, but we also weren't told that the growth of one of those quarters was BETTER than originally posted, either.