Take everything we produce in this economy, all the goods and all the services and add it up.

What does it come to? Well, not as much as we'd like, honestly, from American public media.

This is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kai. Rizzo, it is Thursday today, the 27th of April. Good as always to have you along, everybody.

Now, don't get me wrong. This economy is still growing.

Gross domestic product grew at an annualized rate of 1.1% in the first quarter. That is not so bad given everything that's going on out there.

But 1.1% in Q1 is slower growth than the 2.6% growth we saw in the last quarter of last year.

And that was slower than the quarter before that. And you know where I'm going, right?

One's not a trend, two's not a trend, three. Yeah, that's a trend. Marketplace's a pre-benish or gets us going with where that trend might be taking us.

There were some major things holding the economy back last quarter.

But it was really business investment that wound up being a bigger drag as well as some of the inventory numbers.

Marvin Lowe is senior global macro strategist at State Street Global Markets.

Businesses were not in a mood to invest a lot this best quarter, not in equipment and not in filling up their inventory. Why might that be?

If you don't think that the economy is going to be particularly strong going forward, it doesn't make sense to invest heavily in your inventories and your productive capacity right now.

John Lear is chief economist at Morning Consult. Plus higher interest rates have made it more expensive to take out loans to buy some big piece of equipment or other.

And banks have been less willing to make big loans. New housing construction is also down. That's more dead weight. And yet despite all of this, the economy still grew 1.1%.

The big driver for Q1 was consumption growth.

Jonathan Fingel is chief US economist at UBS. You and me and everybody else kept buying stuff. We spent more on cars, health care, eating out, hotels, retirees, got cost of living adjustments.

And all of that has kept the economy growing. But there is a limit to just how much consumers can keep saving the day.

Inflation wears you down.

This is John Lear again. Inflation is making consumers less willing and able to spend like they used to.

And we saw this early on with low and middle income Americans and it is work its way up the income ladder.

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