Philippine 1Q 2015 GDP Falls to 5.2% Year on Year, .3% Quarter on Quarter

Last night I wrote: 

Yet, why all the seeming panic selling on pre-GDP day?  

Has it been because government insiders may have tipped off tomorrow’s numbers to the connected few (since last week)? 

Will tomorrow’s numbers be vastly lower than mainstream expectations?

Well the numbers are in. They have indeed been far below mainstream expectations. 

From Bloomberg: 

Philippine economic growth slowed to a three-year low last quarter, missing most analyst estimates, as government spending and exports fell at the start of the year.

Gross domestic product increased 5.2 percent in the three months through March from a year earlier, the Philippine Statistics Authority said in Manila Thursday. That compares with a 6.6 percent median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of 19 economists.

Mainstream thinking HARDLY employs reversion to the mean, or investigates the economic picture by looking at prices and how prices affect production and trading patterns and vice versa, or assess on the effects of debt and monetary inflation on G-R-O-W-T-H. The fundamental assumption has been that most of these have neutral effects on economic activities.  

So what they do is to read statistics and project them into the future.

 

And yet whatever happened to the popular rationalization "low" oil and energy prices equals SPENDING G-R-O-W-T-H???

 

Nonetheless here are the 1Q GDP charts

   
1Q year on year GDP was at 5.2%

 

1Q month on month GDP was at  .3%

 

Well these numbers for me, like headline stocks, remain vastly overstated or puffed up--again for political reasons.

 

As for my front running suspicions, the stock market’s pre-GDP announcement reaction seems to have indeed manifested insider tips. So in the prism of market manipulation, what else is new?