U.S. GDP growth sputters

The annual growth rate of 2.3 percent in the first quarter is down from 2.9 percent the previous quarter.    United States gross domestic product — the broadest measure of a nation’s overall economic health — grew at an annual rate of 2.3 percent in the first quarter of 2018, according to the advance estimate from the Department of Commerce.
   The first-quarter growth rate was down from the 2.9 percent annual rate seen in the fourth quarter of 2017 and the slowest since the first quarter of 2017.
   U.S. GDP grew at a 3.2 percent rate in the third quarter of 2017, 3.1 percent in the second quarter and 1.2 percent in the first quarter, meaning that real GDP increased 2.3 percent in 2017 compared with a 1.5 percent growth rate in 2016 and a 2.9 percent increase in 2015.
   GDP is a calculation of the value of the goods and services produced by a nation’s economy minus the value of the goods and services used up in production.
   The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) said the deceleration in GDP growth in the first quarter reflected decreases in personal consumption expenditures, residential fixed investment, exports and state and local government spending. Those factors were offset in part by an increase in private inventory investment as well as a deceleration in imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP.
   Real exports of goods and services grew 4.8 percent in the first quarter, according to BEA, compared with a 7 percent increase in the fourth quarter of 2017. Imports, meanwhile, grew just 2.6 percent, compared with a 14.1 percent jump the previous quarter.
   In other, more encouraging news for the U.S. economy, the most recent data from Commerce indicates new orders for durable goods continued to grow in March, rising 2.6 percent to $254.9 billion, following a revised 3.5 percent decrease in February. The March increase in durable goods orders was the sixth in the last eight months.
   Commerce’s Census Bureau noted that transportation equipment, also up for the sixth time in eight months, drove the increase in durable goods orders, growing 7.6 percent to $91.4 billion for the month. Excluding orders for transportation equipment, total durable goods orders were “virtually unchanged,” according to Census.
   Shipments of manufactured durable goods, now up in 10 of the last 11 months, ticked up 0.3 percent to $250 billion in March, following revised increases of 0.7 percent in February and 0.5 percent each in January and December.