Four-quarter US GDP growth above 10%

Where things stand

• Latest data. BEA's Table 1.1.11 four-quarter growth was 2.6% in 2026Q1 and 2.2% in 2026Q2. The Q2 third estimate came out Sept 30, 2026, at 2.2% annualized.
• Q3 2026. GDPNow puts Q3 2026 at about 3.6% annualized. I computed what that implies from FRED GDPC1 levels: four-quarter growth of only about 2.1%. That is the only quarter BEA will publish before the first horizon.
• The next few quarters are effectively ruled out. Getting above 10% would need about 35% annualized growth in Q4 2026 alone. For Q1 2027 it would need about 17.6% annualized for two straight quarters, and for Q2 2027 about 12.2% for three. So the horizons through 2027 are essentially zero.
• Rebound timing. A crash-and-rebound route can't produce YES before early 2028. The crash quarter has to be the year-earlier base, and nothing has crashed so far in Q4 2026.

Base rate

From FRED A191RO1Q156NBEA (BEA Table 1.1.11 line 1, 1948–2026Q2), I counted the quarters above 10%:

• 1950Q3–1951Q1 (10.3, 13.4, 10.6): Korean War mobilization plus the rebound from the 1949 recession.
• 2021Q2 (12.6): the COVID rebound.

Every other post-1952 boom peaked below 10%: 9.1% in 1959, 8.5% in 1965–66, 8.6% in 1984. So the modern record has one qualifying episode in about 74 years, and it came from a pandemic crash and rebound.

Paths to YES

1. Crash then fast rebound (about 2.3% by end-2031). This needs a quarter that sits about 8–10% below its level a year later, which means a sudden-stop shock with a V-shaped recovery.

• A pandemic like COVID happens roughly 1–2% per year. I put about 30–40% on it causing a lockdown-scale drop followed by a full recovery within a year.
• I add a small amount for cyber or other shocks, including AI-enabled ones.
• That gives a hazard of about 0.6% per year. Crash quarters from Q4 2026 to Q3 2030 are eligible.
• That is below the naive frequency (about 1.35% per year), because COVID's lockdown-driven collapse was historically unusual and US politics now runs against lockdowns.
• There is no current outbreak signal. The October 2026 Siberian lab death has shown no secondary cases (PBS/PolitiFact, Oct 13, 2026).

2. AI-driven boom (about 5% by Q3 2031). AI progress in 2026 looks very fast:

• OpenAI says an internal agent system solved the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize problem (Sept 2026, openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution).
• It says it reached an "automated research intern" and is targeting an automated AI researcher by March 2028.
• Anthropic's revenue run-rate went from about $4.6B in 2025 to about $65B by July 2026.
• Hyperscaler capital spending is about $700B in 2026, and Goldman expects about $1.2T in 2027.

Measured growth hasn't followed yet:

• Productivity growth is about 2.2% a year, unemployment is 4.2%, and the Fed is raising rates against an economy constrained by capacity.
• The 10-year inflation-protected (TIPS) yield of about 2.65% is consistent with moderately higher growth expectations, not explosive ones.
• The capital-spending ramp adds roughly 1–2 points of growth, not 8.

Forecasters and models:

• Experts (low). The FRI/Chicago Fed survey (Karger et al., 2026, fielded before the September breakthroughs) put about 14% on a "rapid" AI scenario by 2030. Pooled probability above 10% for average growth over 2025–29 was 0% unconditionally and 1.5–3.5% under the rapid scenario. LEAP experts expect about 4% under rapid progress.
• Anthropic's own model (Korinek et al., 2026). Growth reaches 15.4% by 2030 only in an "extreme" scenario that reviewers called a thought experiment; the "substantial" scenario gives 5.4%.
• AI-optimistic markets (high). Manifold has 15% on growth above 10% in 2029, 29.5% on at least 10% above the prior peak by 2030, and 29% on the Moll/MacAskill bet (15% per-capita growth above the prior peak by 2033). I discount these for Manifold's known optimism on long-dated AI questions.
• My decomposition. About 12–15% for a fast takeoff by around 2028–29, times about 30% that measured GDP clears 10% before Q3 2031 given the lags from building physical capacity and the measurement gaps. Then about 1% from slower but still strong AI worlds.

Shape of the forecast

The hazard is near zero through 2027. Crash-path hazard is about 0.15% per quarter from Q1 2028. The AI-path hazard rises from about 0.05% to 0.67% per quarter by late 2031. I computed the cumulative series from those quarterly hazards: about 1.0% by end-2028, 2.4% by end-2029, 4.5% by end-2030 and 7.3% by end-2031.

Strongest case against

• For lower: no developed economy has grown 10% outside war or a rebound, and economists treat double-digit growth this decade as extremely unlikely (Moll and Imas, "Will AI soon lead to double-digit growth?"). On that view the answer is about 2–3%.
• For higher: if the September 2026 results mean recursive self-improvement by 2028, an industrial explosion could arrive by 2030–31, and the prediction markets imply 15–30%.

I weight toward the economists, but give real weight to the unusually fast AI progress.

Sources

• FRED A191RO1Q156NBEA and GDPC1: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A191RO1Q156NBEA
• BEA, Q2 2026 third estimate (Sept 30, 2026)
• GDPNow coverage (TradingView, Oct 6–8, 2026)
• FRI/Chicago Fed working paper WP 2026-07: https://www.chicagofed.org/publications/working-papers/2026/2026-07
• LEAP Wave 10 (July 2026)
• Anthropic economic scenarios: https://www.anthropic.com/institute/econ-scenarios
• OpenAI research-acceleration post: https://openai.com/index/research-acceleration-view-inside-openai/
• Manifold API: the will-real-us-gdp-per-capita-grow-by market and related markets
• Wachter & Wachter, NBER w35290
• Bloomberg/Goldman on 2027 capital spending (Sept 25, 2026)
• TIPS yield: tipswatch.com (Sept 17, 2026)

Question. By the last day of each quarter, has BEA reported four-quarter US real GDP growth above 10% for any quarter?

Definitions.

• BEA: the US Bureau of Economic Analysis.
• Four-quarter US real GDP growth: the seasonally adjusted percent change in total US real gross domestic product from a quarter one year earlier, as published in BEA National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) Table 1.1.11, “Real Gross Domestic Product: Percent Change From Quarter One Year Ago,” line 1, “Gross domestic product (GDP)” (API table T10111; corresponding FRED series A191RO1Q156NBEA). This compares quarter t with quarter t−4, not four-quarter averages or annualized quarter-on-quarter growth.
• Above 10%: strictly greater than 10.0 percent at BEA’s published precision for that series. A reported 10.0 percent does not count; do not infer additional precision from separately rounded levels.

Resolves YES if a BEA publication within the Resolution window reports a qualifying value for a completed quarter ending after the opening date, under the Observation period convention. The earliest eligible observation is 2026 Q3. Advance, second, and third estimates, and subsequent annual or comprehensive revisions, all count. A revision first raising an eligible observation above the threshold qualifies on the revision’s publication date. Once YES, later downward revisions do not reverse the result. Growth need not be attributed to AI; recovery from a contraction counts.

Resolves NO if no qualifying publication exists by the horizon. Exclude forecasts, nowcasts, nominal GDP, GDP components, state GDP, calendar-year average growth, and annualized quarter-on-quarter growth. Repetition or revision of pre-opening observations, including the 2021 rebound, does not count.

Resolving source. BEA’s official NIPA Table 1.1.11, line 1, available through its GDP data page, interactive tables, API, or archived BEA releases. A renamed or renumbered successor counts only if it reports the same measure. BEA publications alone are authoritative; third-party reproductions may locate archived evidence but do not independently resolve the question. Apply the Resolution date convention (A3), Resolution window, and Observation period convention.