US economy loses its No 1 spot
http://www.news.com.au/business/stor...68-462,00.html
By Stephen Nisbet in Paris
March 15, 2008 09:42am
THE US economy lost the title of "world's biggest" to the euro zone this week as the value of the US dollar slumped in currency markets.
Taking the gross domestic product of both economies in 2007, the combined GDP of the 15 countries which use the euro overtook that of the US when the European currency surged to a record high of more than $1.56 per euro overnight.
"The curious outcome of breaching this latest milestone is that the size of the euro zone's annual output has now exceeded that of the US," the economics department of Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment bank, said in a note to clients.
Taking official estimates of 2007 GDP, $US13,843,800 billion ($14,726,000) for the United States and 8,847,889.1 billion euros for the euro zone, the economy of the latter passed the US once converted into US dollars, shortly after the euro topped $1.56.
The US dollar sank to $1.5688 per euro late in European trading hours overnight, at which rate the euro zone's 2007 GDP equates to $13,880,568.4 billion.
The 2007 GDP estimates are as published by the US Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis and provided to Reuters on request for the euro zone by Eurostat, the European Union's statistics office.
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