U.S. growth revised up to 5.9% rate in Q4

The Commerce Department reported that U.S. economic growth during the fourth quarter was revised upward, from an annualized rate of 5.7 percent to 5.9 percent, largely due to an even bigger contribution from rising inventories.

For all of 2009, the economy contracted 2.4 percent, the worst performance since 1946.
In this report, the second of three estimates for the fourth quarter, inventories accounted for almost four percentage points of the overall growth rate - nearly two-thirds of the total.

The improvement in consumer spending was revised downward, from a rate of 2.0 percent to 1.7 percent, accounting for just 1.23 percentage points of the overall growth rate, however, this comes after the sharpest contraction in spending in decades. For the year, personal consumption dropped 0.6 percent, the sharpest decline in 26 years.