Kai Risdahl

There's so much happening in the world, and if you have particularly, shall we say, inquisitive kids, it can be hard to answer their questions.

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The macroeconomic news of the day today brought to you by the letters G, D, and P, and P, C, and E. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizal.

Thursday, today, 28 May.

Good as always to have you along, everybody.

I'm Laura Veldkamp, and I'm a professor at Columbia Business School.

We made some calls this morning to help us sort out the two big economic data points of the day.

PCE, the April Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index, which is a fancy way to say inflation.

Also, an update to first quarter gross domestic product.

There's a lot to unpack here.

It's not very good news.

Inflation looks too high.

Growth looks too low.

And neither of those are the direction that we wanted to see.

We'll start where Professor Sinclair started, Q1 economic growth.

That is what this GDP report measures.

It fell four-tenths percent from an earlier estimate to 1.6 percent annualized.

This is a deer in the headlights moment for American businesses.

While businesses are stopping and freezing and asking what's going on and what should they do next, they're not investing, they're not hiring, they're not expanding, and GDP is not growing as much as it should be.