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Bloomberg
Judging by some big boosts to US tracking forecasts following April merchandise-trade data and revised first-quarter growth, economists have turned decidedly more bullish about a pickup from the slow patch in early 2018.
Analysts at Morgan Stanley raised their projection for second-quarter gross domestic product growth to a 3.3 percent annualised rate from 2.5 percent, while Macroeconomic Advisers by IHS Markit estimates the economy will expand 3.6 percent, up from a previous forecast of 2.9 percent. Michael Feroli, chief US economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co., lifted his estimate by half a percentage-point to 2.75 percent and Amherst Pierpont Securities LLC’s chief economist Stephen Stanley boosted his projection to 4.2 percent from 3.8 percent.
The upgrades came after the government’s preliminary figures showed that the nation’s merchandise-trade deficit unexpectedly narrowed in April to a six-month low of $68.2 billion.
While the Commerce Department’s GDP revisions showed slightly weaker growth than it initially reported for the January-March period, one big reason was a slower pace of stockpiling.