Did The "Powers That Be" Shut Down "GDPNow"? -- May 20, 2015

Updates

May 20, 2015: the site is back up. Disregard everything in the original post. 
 

Original Post

One of my favorite sites, "GDPNow" seems to be down for some reason. It may just be a momentary glitch but when I checked at 7:00 a.m. this morning it was down and now two hours later it is still down.

It will be sad if the "powers that be" ordered this site to be taken down because it was ... just too good ... maybe they take it down on the days that the Fed meets or when Janet Yellen tells them to.

Developing ... as Drudge would say. A PDF of GDPNow forecast appears to be current.

This is the headline story today regarding the Fed suggesting that there may be more to the GDPNow story: "What if data the Fed is watching is not dependable." GPDNow does not do much massaging of the data as far as I can tell; the data comes in; they post it quickly and calculate "in-real-time" the expected GDP for the current quarter.

Screen shot when googled "was gdpnow taken down":

The hits certainly suggest that some folks in Washington (those who control and massage the financial news) may not appreciate this site. However, my hunch is Google could do the same thing without much difficulty (they did it with Google Flu easily providing more timely data on annual flu "predictions" than the CDC.