In this clip, @ChrisCuomo claims the US is handling the pandemic worse economically because US GDP ("growth"?!) contracted by 33% while Germany's GDP contracted by 10% in Q2/2020. This comparison is incorrect and misleading. The 33% are an annual rate, the 10% a quarterly change.
This is apples-to-oranges. The annual (or annualized) rate presumes that the contraction would be the same for the entire year as from Q1 to Q2. So if the quarterly change from Q1 to Q2 is bad, the annualized growth rate will look terrible because you compound bad contractions.
The German -10.1% contraction simply compares Q2 to Q1 in 2020. What's the corresponding % for the US? It's -9.5% (you can find that easily at the NYT)! So when comparing apples-to-apples, the US economy contracted LESS than the German one from Q1 to Q2!
By the way, I don't want to make an assessment of how intentional this is. The US is quite unique in reporting these annualized rates. German media are similarly citing the US numbers in apples-to-oranges comparisons. Maybe that's beyond the competence of the average journalist.
As this has been getting a bit more attention that I expected, for some more background, here's a NYT piece by @bencasselman explaining the difference between the annual and the quarter-to-quarter growth rates. Many economists have been pointing this out. nytimes.com/2020/07/30/bus…
And here are the quarterly changes in German GDP: destatis.de/EN/Press/2020/…
