View: Wall Street Journal Survey of Economists: GDP as of October 2012

What do the economists see for Q4? We won't get the Advance Estimate from the BEA until late January. But the WSJ survey participants have weighed in. Their Q4 median and mean estimates are fractionally higher than for Q3, but the range, as we might expect for a gaze further into the future, is wider. The standard deviation is 0.53. There is one rather amazing outlier at the top. If we exclude the cockeyed optimist (allusion to South Pacific), the standard deviation drops to 0.42. As with the Q3 estimates, there are two modes, but they are both on the low side of the mean.