There is much twaddle spoken about finance and economics. Take the eurozone growth figures released on Tuesday and the reaction in stock markets. For starters, it is flat out wrong to report that the economies of Germany and France did not contract in the second quarter – that the former expanded 0.3 per cent from April to June versus the first quarter while the latter remained flat was taken positively by markets. But these were preliminary data. The small print out of Germany’s federal statistics office admits provisional gross domestic product results can “fall below or exceed final results” by up to half a percentage point before the final numbers come in. Likewise, the Insee in Paris calculates that the average revision to its GDP data after three years is 0.3 percentage points.
眼下有很多關於金融和經濟學的胡扯。就拿週二發佈的歐元區成長數據和股市反應來說吧。首先，報告德國和法國經濟在第二季度沒有收縮根本是錯的——數據顯示，德國經濟在4月至6月的這個季度與首季度相比擴張0.3%，而法國經濟與首季度持平，這些數據受到市場的歡迎。但這些只是初步數據。德國聯邦統計局在小字說明中承認，初步的國內生產毛額(GDP)結果可能與最終數據有至多半個百分點的出入，可能偏低，也可能偏高。同樣，法國國家統計局(Insee)的計算是，該國GDP數據在三年後的平均修正幅度爲0.3個百分點。