Wall Street Investors Can’t Remember the Last Time a GDP Report was so Crucial

Second-quarter’s GDP reading came in at 4.1%

Wall Street just traversed a gauntlet: the busiest week of corporate quarterly results, fresh developments in global trade relations and a historic stock tumble by Facebook Inc. However, the headliner of this jam-packed week may be GDP, the official scorecard of the U.S. economy.

As one fixed-income strategist put it, never has a reading of gross domestic product held so much significance, with the three main equity benchmarks—the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, the S&P 500 index SPX and the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP —as well as the U.S. dollar DXY and Treasury TMUBMUSD10Y TMUBMUSD02Y markets primed for Friday’s highly anticipated print.

Here’s how Guy LeBas, head of fixed-income strategy for Janney Montgomery Scott, put it via Twitter on Thursday: “I can’t remember the last time the markets placed such importance on a #GDP number as they have with tomorrow. Given the perceived optimism, a miss could catch rates violently offside (i.e., rally risk),” he wrote.

What’s all the fuss about?

Second-quarter GDP data on Friday cam in at 4.1%, slightly below estimates for from economists polled by MarketWatch for a rate of 4.2%, but still representing the fastest pace of expansion in four years. Although the Federal Reserve’s GDPNow tracker was indicating a Q2 read of 3.8%, as of Thursday.

If it had come ahead of average economist’s projections, it would have been the best GDP report since 2003, wrote MarketWatch’s Steve Goldstein.

Growing buzz around the possibility of such a strong read had come as the White House has been suggesting that the number from the Commerce Department will be huge.

On Thursday, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow predicted that the second-quarter GDP release will live up to the billing.

“You’re going to get a very good economic growth number tomorrow. Big,” Kudlow told Stuart Varney on Fox Business on Thursday.

Fox Business reported that a strong number may be used as an excuse for the Trump administration to take a victory lap, claiming that late-2017 corporate tax cuts and a number of other stimulative measures enacted over the past several months are bearing fruit. The current print may still be sufficiently strong for the administration to claim victory. Additionally, the first-quarter reading of GDP was lifted to 2.2% from a first read of 2.0%.

How will the market react over the longer term? It’s hard to say. With enthusiasm?

But also not without some skepticism, amid a barrage of tariff threats and revisions to the data that some argue could inform results, as Natixis strategists Joseph LaVorgna notes:

And as Patrick Chovanec, managing director and chief strategist at Silvercrest Asset Management, indicates via this Twitter thread:

Others note that at least some of the growth can be attributed to a rush to get ahead of the Trump administration’s tariff threats, which have had an outsize impact on the soybean market, as David Rosenberg points out:

On Thursday, investors mostly fixated on a decline in shares of Facebook FB which saw its worst day ever as a public company after a disappointing forecast for revenue, weighing on the broader market, although the Dow finished firmly higher. However, a string of otherwise rosy second-quarter earnings and an upbeat GDP may deliver just the right dollop of fuel to ignite the markets higher.

Article was originally published by Mark DeCambre at marketwatch.com