Consensus for April is unemployment will top 9%. This Swine Flu may have been over hyped, but it still may harm economic growth going forward. 2Q GDP is going to be in the shitter as a result. Plus all those millions of college grads looking for employment won't find any, could unemployment top 10% for May? The GM dealership closings alone is going to do some pretty serious damage.
I don't know if the government is that stupid. They've only got a margin of .2% to revise down, and then you send the markets back into the abyss, b/c it will show that GDP did not improve at all...not a fraction of a point. Worse yet, if the govt revised below last quarters figures, and shows a lower figure than last quarter...the shaky sentiment will nose dive (along w/ the markets). I think we're going to see some highly-questionable figures going forward; much more so that usual.
From Intrade: United States GDP growth for Q3 of 2009 will be postive Contract priced at 35.0 US Unemployment Rate in Dec 2009 to be greater than 10.00% Contract priced at 57.5 Interesting.