Cathie Wood And Elon Musk Renew Plea For Fed To Slash Rates, Point To Plummeting Real Economy

Cathie Wood and Elon Musk are renewing their campaign against the Federal Reserve's high interest rates, urging the central bank and economists to respond to the latest negative economic data and rising recession fears.

On Tuesday, the manager of the Ark Innovation ETF ARKK, tweeted that the recent drop in worldwide sales of 3M Company MMM is incontrovertible proof of a deterioration in global GDP.

Shocking! In Q1, 3M organic local currency sales - a gauge of global nominal GDP - dropped 5.6% YOY with US up 0.4%, Europe down 3.9%, and Asia down 16.7%. Consensus nominal GDP growth for US is +7% YOY. When will the Fed and economists start responding to the real world?

— Cathie Wood (@CathieDWood) April 25, 2023

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and Twitter, replied by questioning whether the Fed was making decisions based on outdated information or just choosing to ignore the "bad data they have."

Also Read: 3M Q1 Highlights: 9% Sales Decline, Earnings Beat, Additional Jobs Cuts, Savings & More

Q1 GDP Data Looming This Week 

On Thursday, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis will disclose its preliminary estimates for the GDP growth rate in the first quarter of 2023.

Economists predict a 2% quarter-on-quarter annualized increase. That refers to the real GDP figure, which does not take into consideration the price change effect. The nominal (also known as current-dollar) GDP figure is predicted to increase by 7% year-on-year.

Last year, the U.S. economy expanded 2.1% in real terms and 6.6% in nominal ones, mainly due to increases in private inventory investment, consumer spending, nonresidential fixed investment, and federal government spending. 

Read Next: End Of Banking Turmoil: Major Central Banks Retract Emergency Dollar Swap Operations

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