The bad economic news yesterday came when the Bureau of Economic Analysis released its second estimate of our first quarter GDP. Rather than its initial estimate of an increase of 0.1 percent, the BEA now thinks the economy shrank by 1.0 percent in the first quarter. That makes it the first down quarter for the economy since the first quarter of 2011, when the economy shrank by 1.3 percent.
That quarter proved to be a short-lived blip. It was the first quarter in which the economy had contracted since we emerged from the recession in the middle of 2009, and it was followed by 11 consecutive quarters of expansion.
Will this year's first-quarter figure be more of the same? It's impossible to see three years into the future, but in the near term, economists are still optimistic. The consensus is for GDP growth to rebound to about 4 percent in the current quarter, and to hold at about 3 percent for the rest of the year.
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