Do you really know when the heat is getting to you?

I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. The official measure of growth is in now, showing the U.S. economy grew by more than expected at a 3% annual rate in the spring and December quarter after going negative, contracting over the winter.

To understand this better, I want to turn to Catherine

Ann Edwards in Houston. She's a labor economist and Bloomberg opinion columnist. Thank you for

joining us. Of course. I look at this headline number for economic growth. Wowie Kazawi,

happy days are here again. It is morning in America. Is that how you read it? Not quite,

although the headline number is

very reassuring if maybe a little bit of a mirage of what's going on. A mirage? What way?

The GDP report measures the size of the U.S. economy, which has four components,

consumer spending, business spending, government spending, and trade.

What's been going on over the past six months in both the negative number we got last quarter

and this big positive number we got this quarter are swings in that final component. Trade.

That makes sense. We've had an incredibly volatile trade policy since the start of the year.

The numbers that we tend to care more about are ones that are either more meaningful of how the

economy is actually performing for Americans and businesses on the ground.

And those numbers do not look as good.

In fact, they look much weaker than they did last year.

Consumer spending, which is how much households are spending,

that's down at 1.4%.

And it averaged double that last year.

So the headline number is showing the volatility in trade

and imports and exports,

...