Five signs the US economy is still motoring along—despite the Fed

The latest data shows that US gross domestic product grew by 2.4% in the second quarter of 2023, far above the 1.8% forecast by economists. Fueling the growth: investment by businesses in buildings and equipment.

Thanks to a summer of blockbusters—Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, Oppenheimer, Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning, Part I—movie theatres are more packed than they’ve been since a certain virus spread around the world.

The big boom in job numbers is fading, but unemployment is also falling. Economists say that’s still a sign of a healthy economy.

The US dollar remained stable in the first half of the year, but it reached a tipping point as inflation slowed. The weakening dollar, though, was good for companies that generated a large share of their revenue internationally. This applied, in particular, to large tech firms, which saw their stock reach a new high in mid-July.

The wave of spending generated by US president Joe Biden’s various legislations—the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, and more—is still spreading through the economy. In early August, the Atlanta Fed bumped up its GDP estimate on the back of strong construction and manufacturing activity. Americans are building and making, exactly as Bidenomics hopes they will.