Here comes GDP ...
Economists forecast that the economy grew just 0.7%, according to Bloomberg, marking a slowdown from the pace of 1.4% recorded in the fourth quarter.
Personal consumption is also expected to have dropped, to 1.7%.
And, core personal consumption expenditures are estimated 1.9% quarter-on-quarter.
Pantheon Macroeconomics' Ian Shepherdson wrote to clients:
Allowing for the impact of the trade numbers-as much as 0.7 percentage points on GDP growth, depending on your initial assumption-you can expect to hear talk ahead of the report today of growth potentially as high as 1.5%.
We'd be surprised by that, but inventories are a wild card, and the range of possible outcomes for March consumption is unusually wide too. Whatever prints this morning, though, the key point here is that the GDP report will show that the economy performed poorly in the first quarter, following growth of just 1.4% in the fourth quarter of last year. At the end of last year most forecasters, ourselves included, hoped for a clear rebound in the first quarter.
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