I’ll be traveling and attending to the final arrangements for my mom over the next few days and so blogging will be light to nonexistent, returning with the usual fare on Monday, June 2.

Today’s revised GDP report for this year’s first quarter looks dismal. Growth was considerably weaker than expected, with economic activity slumping 1.0% in the first three months of the year on a seasonally adjusted annualized basis. That’s quite a bit lower than the 0.1% gain in the initial estimate. But the GDP report, which isn’t all that valuable for real-time business cycle analysis, is misleading if you read it in a vacuum. Indeed, more recently updated economic reports paint a considerably brighter picture, including today’s news on jobless claims, which dipped to the lowest level since August 2007.
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Tomorrow’s update on US personal consumption spending for April is expected to report a gain of 0.3% vs. the previous month, based on The Capital Spectator’s median econometric forecast. That’s substantially below March’s 0.9% increase.
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