FW: Bundesbank mocks US IT book-cooking

[Seth Ackerman]

> Next, the bank ventures a guess at how the application of US-style hedonic
> indexing would have changed German economic data. After adjustment using
> the US deflator, "German IT investment amounted to an estimated DM64bn
> (Dollars 29bn) in 1998, more than twice as much as the amount of real
> investment cited in official statistics. In fact, in 1999, the divergence
> increased to slightly more than 170 per cent. For the years since 1991, on
> a US price basis, real IT equipment investment in Germany swelled at an
> average rate of 27.5 per cent a year, compared with 6 per cent by the
> conventional method."
> 
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What are the equivalent numbers for U.S. IT equipment investment growth
since 1991? I'm dying to know! Also, why does Grant say these figures can't
be used to estimate how fast the German's measured GDP growth would be using
hedonic pricing?

Seth