Talk about a tariff last hurrah. America rushed to import goods in the first quarter of 2025 in advance of Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day,” and that was enough to put the economy into negative territory. Today’s GDP report shows the Q1 result at an annualized -0.3% rate of growth, but the import data buried otherwise mildly positive data.
NBC reported on the phenomenon rather straightforwardly:
The U.S. economy contracted 0.3% in the first quarter of 2025, the first negative reading since the Covid pandemic, according to an initial measurement by the Commerce Department.
The decline was fueled by a massive surge in imports. Consumer spending, meanwhile, climbed 1.8%, the weakest pace since mid-2023.
Economists were expecting gross domestic product (GDP) to have advanced 0.4% for the first three months of 2025, compared with 2.4% in the fourth quarter of…
