We often hear that consumer spending constitutes 70 percent of the American economy, so any rise in retail sales ought to be considered good news indeed. The Commerce Department announced on Monday that retail spending increased by 1.1 percent in March - the biggest such monthly increase in a year and a half.
On top of that, Commerce also revised February's retail figures upward. Add all that up, and economists now think the U.S. economy will grow at around 3 percent in the second quarter of 2014 in a survey conducted by the Wall Street Journal. That would be double the 1.5 percent we had in the first quarter,
Over the course of the recovery, now about five years old, GDP growth has averaged of 2.5 percent per quarter, so this quarter has the potential to exceed that. The same economists also predicted that 3 percent growth rate to prevail through the second half of 2014.
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