CHICAGO – While economists were predicting as late as Thursday that the 1st Quarter GDP would drop even lower than 2018's 4th Quarter – somewhere around 2%, likely to be downgraded to 1.8% – the US economy surprised everyone with Friday's morning's figures.
Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased 3.2 percent in the first quarter of 2019, according to the "advance" estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the fourth quarter of 2018, real GDP increased 2.2 percent.
That's good news for the U.S. – bulking up its world-leading $20,891 Trillion gross domestic product, with the second leading nation being China with $12,237 Trillion GDP. Third place is Japan at $4.7 Trillion.
Even the most subdued economists are now saying they do not expect a recession in 2019, despite the US nearing a record-setting time period since the last recession in 2008-9.
