Gold Imports Expose Atlanta Fed’s Broken Models — And Why the New GDPNow Will Fail Too
The GDPNow Collapse: Another Model, Another Failure
The Atlanta Fed’s much-hyped GDPNow model — supposedly a cutting-edge tool for forecasting U.S. GDP growth — was obliterated this quarter by a flood of gold imports. That's right: a surge in physical gold, largely investor-driven, made their algorithm crash and burn.
For those who don't track every grim move of these institutions (and frankly, you shouldn't have to), here’s the short version: GDPNow had been predicting steady 2%+ growth for Q1. But when January’s trade data was plugged in on February 28, the model imploded — swinging a staggering five percentage points into the red. Clickbait peddlers quickly proclaimed a looming depression.
What no one in the media bothered to explain was this: gold imports should have been excluded from GDP calculations all along. Gold, like stocks or cryptocurrencies, is an investment asset — not consumption or production — and thus it doesn’t belong in GDP math. The real scandal? The Atlanta Fed’s elite economists either forgot or ignored that fundamental fact.
Gold Bars, Swiss Shipments, and the Great Model Distortion
The trigger was a record-breaking surge in non monetary gold imports. According to U.S. data, what should have been a $2 billion trade figure ballooned to nearly $29 billion by January — thanks to a tidal wave of gold bars moving from London to Switzerland and then flooding into the U.S.
This gold rush wasn't about consumption or industrial supply. It was about investors rushing to reposition assets — a canary in the coal mine, if you ask me, for deeper instability lurking in the financial system. Yet because the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model didn't properly account for this, it annualized the spike, projecting twelve months' worth of panic-driven gold buying onto the economy — and triggered a massive, false GDP collapse.
Only after weeks of confusion did the Atlanta Fed cobble together a “gold-adjusted” GDPNow, which showed a far less dramatic picture (about -0.4%). Quietly, they admitted their failure.
Enter the "New GDPNow Model" — And Don’t Trust It Either
On April 29, the old GDPNow model will be officially euthanized. The New GDPNow, launching April 30, will attempt to correct for gold imports and similar anomalies. Their solution? Discard partial data and rely more heavily on Swiss gold export figures — information that isn't even produced by U.S. agencies.
Translation: they’re guessing. And they’re guessing with the same hubris that led them into this mess in the first place.
The Atlanta Fed itself admitted that because American trade data aggregates industrial goods and precious metals together, they can't cleanly separate gold inflows until much later — long after GDP estimates have been made and reported. Once again, you’re being fed fiction disguised as fact.
What This Tells Us About the System — and What You Must Do
If a few tons of gold can wipe out the credibility of a model built by the finest economists the Federal Reserve System can muster, what faith can you possibly place in their inflation numbers, unemployment figures, or “soft landing” narratives?
You can’t. You shouldn’t.
And frankly, you'd be a fool if you did.
The only rational move is to build your own defenses — outside the banking system, outside the fiat trap, outside the crumbling illusions of stability.
Bill Brocius has laid out exactly how to do this in his free ebook, 7 Steps to Protect Yourself from Bank Failure.
I strongly recommend you download it today. If you want even deeper analysis straight from Bill’s desk, subscribe to the Inner Circle for just $19.95. Because the next failure won’t announce itself with a press release — and you can bet it’ll hit faster than the Fed can rewrite their models.
