JPM's head economist Michael Feroli just joined the bandwagon of other Wall Streeters in cutting Q4 GDP, trimming his prior forecast of 3.5% to 3.0%. However, as this is backward looking, it is largely irrelevant if confirming what we already knew: that the economy was certainly not growing as fast as the market implied it was (yes, the manipulated market is not the economy, no matter how much the Fed would like that to be the case). A bigger question is what should one expect from the future. Yes - an in vitro future, isolated from the daily rumor mill of what may or may not happen to the French rating tomorrow or the day after. It is here that there is nothing good to expect: 'we think growth will downshift from 3.0% in 4Q11 to 2.0% in 1Q12. Looking beyond the first quarter, we expect a growing private domestic sector will contend with a fading drag from the external sector and a persistent drag from the public sector." Yet where JPM falls short, is its optimistic view on the private sector. As David Rosenberg showed yesterday, the ratio of negative to positive preannouncements just hit a multi-year high, with the primary culprit being the strong dollar. Unfortunately for Feroli's bullish angle, the private sector will not do all that well at all if the EURUSD remains in the mid 1.20s or falls further. In fact, corporate earnings will likely be trounced, which in combination with everything else that JPM lists out, correctly, could make the second half of 2012 a perfect storm for economic growth, an event which Obama's pre-electoral planners are all too aware of. What is the only possible recourse? Why more QE of course. The only unknown is "when."

From JP Morgan on the past:

The J.P. Morgan forecast now estimates that GDP growth last quarter was close to 3%. Although this is down a little from our earlier estimate of 3.5%, it would still be the first GDP number to have a “3” in front of the decimal since the second quarter of 2010. A substantial part of the growth seen last quarter owes to firms building inventories after being very cautious about stockbuilding in 3Q, and we anticipate inventory-building accounted for about 1.3%-pts of the 4Q growth. In part because that onetime lift to growth will likely fade in the current quarter, we anticipate that growth will downshift to around 2.0% in the first quarter of the year.

... and the future: