“The core of the economy is resilient,” Michael Pearce, chief US economist at Oxford Economics wrote on Friday, adding that he expected growth to pick up again this year.<\/p>\n
Despite the underlying momentum, sharp swings in trade policy last year sent the economic data on a roller coaster ride. <\/p>\n
The year started in a mild contraction, fuelled in part by a jump in imports – which subtract from growth in calculations of gross domestic product (GDP) – as firms rushed goods into the country ahead of anticipated tariffs. <\/p>\n
Growth bounced back in the spring and summer, as foreign imports slowed, before decelerating again in the final months of the year, as imports started to recover. <\/p>\n
The release of trade data on Thursday – which showed the trade deficit widening in December – had prompted a flurry of last-minute, downward revisions to growth forecasts for the October-December period. <\/p>\n
But the slowdown was still more severe than many economists had anticipated.<\/p>\n
While private investment picked up, it remained largely concentrated in intellectual property and IT-related equipment. <\/p>\n
Consumer spending rose 2.4%, cooling from 3.5% in the prior quarter. <\/p>\n
Government spending plunged more than 16%.<\/p>\n
“The government shutdown ended up being a much bigger drag on the economy” than other data had suggested, Paul Ashworth, chief North America economist at Capital Economics wrote in a note. He said he expected that decline to be reversed in the months ahead. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“The core of the economy is resilient,” Michael Pearce, chief US economist at Oxford Economics wrote on Friday,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":437106,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-437105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=437105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437105\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/437106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=437105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=437105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=437105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}