The New York Fed has unveiled a hot new forecasting tool for the US economy

New York Fed

Not to be outdone by the Atlanta Fed, the New York Federal Reserve has created its own new tool to forecast US economic growth. 

In a post on Tuesday, the New York Fed introduced the FRBNY Nowcast, a tool that will use the latest data releases to compute estimates for gross domestic product daily. 

Additionally, the New York Fed will publish a weekly Nowcasting Report, which details how the data are shaping their latest GDP forecast. 

Economists already pay attention to the Atlanta Fed's GDPNow tracker, which famously nailed the GDP print for Q1 2015. 

The New York Fed is confident that, based on various academic studies, nowcasting models "produce results that are comparable to, and often more accurate than, those of the best human forecasters, with the added advantage of being automatic and free of judgment."

"This does not mean that nowcasting is always spot-on," the New York Fed is quick to add. The actual GDP number is republished twice before it becomes final, and even that is subject to more revisions much later. 

Each bar on the chart above represents the contribution of various kinds of data to the GDP estimate. 

And, the black diamond is their estimate of Q1 GDP, which right now is 1.1%

That forecast is 1% higher than the Atlanta Fed's 0.1%.

And so unless we see this estimate fall meaningfully, or the Atlanta Fed's rise, it will be interesting to see which forecast is more accurate. 

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