Shmoop Finance
Make Moolah, Not War
Word of the day: Nominal GDP
"Real" = inflation adjusted. "Nominal" = not inflation adjusted.
That's about it. Then it's just GDP. See: Gross Domestic Product - GDP.
How much did GDP grow last year? It’s just a number. It’s a percent, usually, in most quoted press. So it grew…3.2%. That’s great. But what does it mean, really? Well, what if inflation was 2%? Then GDP really only grew 1.2%. That’s its real GDP. Its nominal rate was 3.2%.
And why is this even a Thing? Because we wanna keep things...real. Huge inflation would totally obscure how well or poorly we’re really doing, hence the real and nominal triangulation in the process of...keeping’ it real.