What economic trends are highlighted in the third quarter GDP growth?
GDP growth jumped in the third quarter from Marketplace. I'm Sabri Beneshour, in for David Brancaccio. The gross domestic product of the United States, that is the sum total of the entire economy, grew at an annualized rate of 4.3% in the third quarter. That is faster than it grew in the first and second quarters. And this is not just consumers buying stuff.
Larry Adam is chief investment officer at Raymond James, which is a Marketplace underwriter. Welcome, Larry. Thank you very much for having me. Happy holidays. So 4.3 percent is pretty good. What do you think? Yeah, well, for GDP, I think that that's a very good, very solid number for the third quarter. And the good thing about it is that it was broad based.
You know, you saw good spending by the consumer. Exports were up really strong, almost 9 percent. And even government spending was up 2.2 percent driven by defense spending. So overall, pretty broad based strength in that number. But I would caveat it because if you just think about this, this number is fairly old.
It goes back to the economic data that we were generating at the beginning of July. So it is pretty dated as we sit here right now. Yeah. July through September. And here we are in December. Any idea as to what GDP is looking like right now as we speak? Yeah, I think right now as we sit here in the fourth quarter, I do think you're going to see some temporary softness in the economy.
The reason for that is that we did have the government shutdown this particular quarter. I think tariffs are taking a little bit of a bite out of the ability for consumers to spend. But I wouldn't write off the fourth quarter because it just came out this morning that MasterCard's spending survey came out, and spending so far through the holiday shopping season is up about 3.9%.
So that's still a pretty solid number for the consumer spending this shopping season. Next year, we are getting some of the incentives for spending and investment out of the big tax and spending bill that was passed earlier this year. What's that going to do for GDP growth?
Yeah, I think it's going to boost GDP growth next year, particularly during the first half of the year, because when people actually file for their taxes, I think you're going to see some significant rebates coming back. In fact, we estimate that the average you're going to see is that an increase of about a thousand dollars. So I think this will be a pretty big boost for the consumer next year.
Larry Adam is chief investment officer at Raymond James. Thank you so much. Thank you. The U.S. is banning foreign-made drones. And by foreign-made, in this case, we really mean Chinese-made. Chinese firm DJI, for example, sells more than half the commercial drones used in the U.S. and supplies 80% of state and local law enforcement and disaster relief drone programs.
The Federal Communications Commission says its move is about national security. Marketplace's Nova Sappho has more. Under a law Congress passed a year ago, the FCC had until today to decide what to do about Chinese-made drones, which proliferate the U.S., especially for uses such as agriculture, filmmaking, and law enforcement.
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