Real vs. Nominal

Almost any economic number, wages, GDP, interest rates, can be reported two ways: nominal, the raw figure with no adjustment, or real, the same figure adjusted to strip out the effect of inflation. The gap between the two matters enormously: nominal GDP growth of 6% sounds strong, but if inflation ran at 5% that year, real growth was only about 1%, a much less impressive number. Whenever a headline economic figure seems surprisingly large, it's worth checking whether it's the nominal or the real version before drawing a conclusion from it.