Consumer spending increased in April by 0.5%, following March’s 4.7%. Services rose 1.1% as the trend we’ve discussed previously on the consumer rotation into favoring services coming out of the pandemic continued and has not shown sensitivity to rising prices.
Initial jobless claims continue to improve with the latest weekly data almost falling below 400K. At 406K it was again the best reading we have seen since the pandemic began and an improvement from 444K the week before and the 425K expectations by economists surveyed by Bloomberg.
Q1 GDP was revised slightly upwards to 6.5%, from the 6.4% annualized rate in the initial release.