It is 7:30 a.m. in washington and a bevy of reporters files into the Department of Commerce, which is kitty-corner from the Treasury. They take their seats, and the door is locked behind them. For the next hour, no one can go in or out. An official from the Bureau of Economic Analysis distributes the latest GDP estimates—that’s Gross Domestic Product—and answers questions. Then the reporters get an hour to file their stories.

This monthly event is called the lock-up, and in most times it is a metronome in the cycle of Washington economic news. The GDP is essentially a tally of the money that Americans spend over a given period. In a commercial culture, such transactions are alpha and omega, and the GDP updates are like utterances from the oracle. Amid the market turmoil that besets the country as I write, the GDP will loom as a harbinger of good times or bad.

The resulting stories have a strange combination of opacity and authority, a journalistic equivalent of the Latin mass. The specifics vary, but the script remains pretty much the same. There are upticks and downturns. Growth is robust or anemic, exceeds expectations or disappoints them. That is the story, in its Mr. Potato Head variations, along with portentous comment from those ubiquitous Wall Street analysts whose institutional interest in spinning the numbers somehow goes without mention.

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