I told you...always wait for the revised figures
Economic Growth Weaker Than Expected
By Martin Crutsinger
AP Economics Writer
Friday, July 30, 2004; 8:58 AM
The U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of just 3 percent in the spring, a dramatic slowdown from the rapid pace of the past year, as consumer spending fell to the weakest rate since the slowdown of 2001, the government reported Friday.
The Commerce Department said that the gross domestic product, the country's total output of goods and services, slowed sharply in the April-June quarter from a 4.5 percent growth rate in the first three months of the year.
The size of the slowdown caught economists by surprise. Many had been looking for GDP growth to come in around 3.8 percent in the second quarter. Even that would have been a sharp deceleration for an economy that had been growing at a 5.4 percent annual rate through the year ending in March.
It raised the issue of whether the economy, which Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said last week had encountered a "soft patch" in June, could be in danger of seeing growth falter even more in coming quarters.
