PolicyEngine Macro

US topic · output

Is the US economy growing, and what can these models honestly say?

Real GDP is 2.1% up on the year in 2026Q2, derived here from a stored level of 24,270.599; no model on this site forecasts US output, and the 2.0% shown for 2026Q3 below is a conditioning baseline, not a forecast.

01 — where it stands

The numbers, as the snapshot stores them.

REAL GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT · YEAR ON YEAR

+2.1%

derived here, not stored: 24,270.599 in 2026Q2 against 23,770.976 in 2025Q2 · billions of chained 2017 dollars, seasonally adjusted annual rate

Observation
2026Q2
Vintage
2026-08-04

REAL GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT

$24.3tn

stored as 24,270.599 · billions of chained 2017 dollars, seasonally adjusted annual rate

Observation
2026Q2
Vintage
2026-08-04

GDPC1 is a level, not a growth rate: FRED stores it as billions of chained 2017 dollars, seasonally adjusted annual rate. The UK growth topic can print a published year-on-year rate because the ONS publishes one; there is no equivalent series in this store for the US, so the rate above is derived from the stored levels — 24,270.599 in 2026Q2 against 23,770.976 in 2025Q2 is 2.1%.

How those readings have moved, derived from the same stored observations rather than typed in: Real gross domestic product -0.6pp on the year-on-year rate against the prior quarter (2026Q1).

02 — what the models see

The model view, and the same breath its limits.

No model in this suite forecasts the US economy. The only member whose question types include forecast is boe-svar, and its geography is UK-only. What the two US models do instead is trace deviations from a fixed baseline, and the registry is specific about how far that goes:

  • frb-us answers economic_shock and nothing else. Its predictive validation is not_assessed — “LONGBASE is an illustrative tracking baseline, not an official Fed forecast, and no historical forecast evaluation is published here.”
  • us-hank answers economic_shock, and the first thing it cannot answer is forecasts (IRFs around a calibrated steady state, not a forecaster). Its predictive validation is not_applicable — “The model produces impulse responses around a calibrated steady state; it is not a forecaster and makes no predictive claims.”
  • frb-us outputs GDP, unemployment, inflation, prices, federal funds rate — as responses to a reviewed shock under a declared policy rule, over a quarterly horizon, never as a path anyone is asked to believe in.

The baseline those deviations are measured from is published, so it is shown rather than hidden. It is the Federal Reserve staff-style conditioning path packaged with the model, extracted from LONGBASE.TXT, and it carries no bands because none exist:

FRB/US April 2026 LONGBASE, year-on-year real GDP growth. This is the conditioning baseline that frb-us shock experiments deviate from — not a forecast, and not scored on the forecast record.
QuarterBaselineStatus against the outturnUncertainty
2026Q22.46%outturn already publishednone — the baseline carries no interval
2026Q31.97%no outturn yetnone — the baseline carries no interval
2026Q42.40%no outturn yetnone — the baseline carries no interval
2027Q12.38%no outturn yetnone — the baseline carries no interval
2027Q22.37%no outturn yetnone — the baseline carries no interval

Predictive validation: not_assessed. LONGBASE is an illustrative tracking baseline, not an official Fed forecast, and no historical forecast evaluation is published here. Read the validation page →

The UK growth topic carries a model forecast with 68% and 90% ranges because boe-svar produces one and it is scored before the outturn exists. This page has no such layer, and inventing one out of a tracking baseline is the specific mistake it refuses to make — see the UK page for the contrast →

03 — run it yourself

Every number above is a command away.

There is no forecast command to run. What is runnable is the model's own account of itself, the levers it exposes, and a shock: a 1 percentage-point funds-rate surprise under the default inertial Taylor rule, read out over twenty quarters. 

pe-macro frbus-summary   # implementation, provenance and scope limits
pe-macro frbus-variables   # the shockable FRB/US levers and their units
pe-macro frbus-shock --var rffintay_aerr --shock 1.0 --horizon 20   # output response to a 1pp policy surprise
pe-macro hank-shock --kind monetary --size -0.0025 --persistence 0.6   # the same question in the HANK model, as an IRF

Over MCP the same two models are frbus_shock and hank_shock, their metadata and scope limits are frbus_summary and hank_summary, and get_model_status returns the limitations quoted above as structured data rather than prose. recommend_model returns an explicit warning rather than a guess when no model supports a request. Connect a client →

04 — the data behind it

Source, coverage, and the immutable file.

Every value on this page is read from the vintage file linked here, not from a live call.
SeriesPublisherCoverageSnapshotsThis vintageNext release
Real gross domestic productFRED · GDPC12020Q1 – 2026Q222026-08-04.jsonnot announced

BEA revises the national accounts three times in the quarter after a first estimate and again at annual and comprehensive revisions, so the snapshot date matters as much as the observation quarter. FRED supplies no announced next-release date through this site's fetcher, so the column says so rather than guessing a schedule from the publisher's calendar.

The snapshot files are append-only and never edited, so a number published here can be reproduced against the data as it stood — browse the store, its release calendar, and the as-of recipe →