Commentary
Last week, the Commerce Department announced that its preliminary first-quarter GDP estimate was a snail-paced 1.6% annual rate, well below economists’ consensus estimate of a 2.5% annual pace. One reason is that the core Personal Consumption inflation index rose 0.3% in March and 2.8% in the past year. The Dow initially fell 700 points on this 1-2 punch, but the market clawed back most of that loss by the closing, and Friday recovered to deliver weekly gains of +2.7% in the S&P 500 and +4.2% in Nasdaq.
