In April, we learned that gross domestic product grew at a rate of 2% in the first quarter. This Thursday, we’ll get another reading of Q1 GDP, with additional information about consumer spending and business investment.
There was some weird weather in a lot of the U.S. this winter, and Bank of America economist Stephen Juneau predicts that’ll drag down GDP growth.
“You had snow where you don’t typically have snow, cold weather where you don’t typically have cold weather, so that led to airport closures, or at least cancellations, right?” he said.
People couldn’t travel to weekend getaways far from that snow or get out to watch basketball games or go to concerts. In economic terms, it hurt consumers’ ability to buy services. And we get a lot more information on that in this week’s estimate.
“Services is basically a guess in the initial release,” Juneau said.
Meanwhile, Truist economist Mike Skordeles is going to be watching for changes to imports, because those directly affect American manufacturers’ ability to do what they need to do.
“Nearly every product, whether it’s made in the U.S. or not, typically has some sort of component, or something — coating of some sort — that comes from somewhere else,” he said.
This GDP reading doesn’t take into account the last two months of geopolitical turmoil, but Skordeles said it does tell us how healthy the economy was going into it.
