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From full global headquarters, this is Motley Fool Money.

Welcome to Motley Fool Money. Thanks for being here. I'm your host, Chris Helm.

I'm joined by Motley Fool's Senior Analyst, Charlie Travers, James Early, and Ron Gross.

Good to see you. Good to see you, Chris.

Lots of companies reporting earnings this week will dig into the latest numbers from Ford, Microsoft, McDonald's, and more.

We'll look at a couple of IPOs, plus, as always, giving an inside look at the stocks on our radar.

But we begin this week with the big macro. The government said on Friday that the economy grew at an annual rate of 3.2% in the last three months of the year.

Consumer spending was up sharply, but Ron Gross, the business inventories and the construction activity numbers were not exactly pretty. Break it down for us.

So 3.2% is pretty strong in general. It's lower than expectations, and the market trades on expectations, obviously.

But let's move aside from that for a moment. As you said, consumer spending and exports look really good.

What wasn't as strong is actually what has been driving the growth in prior quarters, which was inventory.

Companies have been building their inventories back up once the recession kind of went away, and we've been slowly getting back up to speed.

They did that at a slower rate in the fourth quarter. They did not need to continue to purchase goods to sell to the public.

Plenty of items already on the shelf. Plenty of items in the warehouse.

And then demand for goods based on what they say. They did not keep up that same rate of purchasing, and that dragged the numbers down to 3.2.

It probably would have been higher than 7% if those inventory rates had kept going at similar rates to prior quarters, but 3.2% is still pretty good.

On Tuesday, President Obama had his State of the Union address. In the speech, he proposed a reduction in corporate tax rates.

Is that a good idea, and is that the kind of thing that's going to be good for GDP growth?

It actually is, Chris. Innovation is really our meal ticket, I think, for this country.

We become a nation of entertainers, so to speak. We're very cool, but we don't focus a lot on the hard sciences.

Excuse me, and on business and Obama's speech actually hit both these nails on the head. I mean, it wasn't riveting, but I think you really got to the crux of the matter.

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