Key Takeaways
- The U.S. GDP is expected to have grown at an annual rate of just 0.3% in the first quarter, a sharp slowdown from 2.4% in the previous quarter.
- If it materializes, the slowdown would likely reflect the impact of a surge of imports: People raced to buy things ahead of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, and imports count against GDP growth.
- The slowdown would be one of the first “hard data” indicators showing the tariffs’ economic impact.
President Donald Trump’s tariffs have been slow to affect hard economic data, but that could change Wednesday when the import taxes could blow a hole in the Gross Domestic Product figures.
Wednesday’s scheduled GDP report is likely to show that the key measure of the country’s economic output rose at an annual rate of just 0.4% in the first quarter, according to the median forecast from a survey of economists conducted by the Wall…
