The Bureau of Economic Analysis’s advance estimate of real gross domestic product in the first quarter of 2017, which was released in April, had the U.S. economy growing at an annual rate of just 0.7 percent. The BEA’s second estimate, which is “based on more complete source data” and which was released today, increases the estimate for the annual rate of first quarter growth in real GDP to only 1.2 percent. In the last quarter of 2016, according to the BEA, real GDP grew at an annual rate of 2.1 percent, while for all of 2016 it grew at only...
