The economy gets a checkup.

From Marketplace, I'm Sabrie Beneshore in for David Brancaccio.

Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination last night

and promised to bring down inflation, lower interest rates, lower taxes, and lower the debt.

We go through those somewhat conflicting economic promises elsewhere in the program, you can

hear it on our podcast.

But underneath the political uncertainty uncertainty we've got a lot of hard

economic data out this week about the economy of right now. Diane Swank is here to

talk about it. She's chief economist at KPMG. Good morning. Let's go through some of this economic

data this week. Retail sales, they were flat for the month of June, but part of that was a

cyber attack on auto dealer software that caused auto sales to be delayed.

That aside, how is the consumer doing?

What really was stunning, we saw consumers push back really since the start of the year and

late last year against price hikes. P

really since the start of the year and late last year against price hikes and retailers said okay we get it

They did discounting and sure enough discount and they will come consumers spend on everything from clothing and to big ticket items

like furniture and appliances and building materials things we haven't seen much of

this year and that boosted overall consumer spending in the second quarter.

We'll get the read on that next week on GDP growth, which is likely to hit or exceed 2.5% after 1.3% in the first quarter.

So that's quite a reaction function.

And exactly where the Fed would like to see things go,

prices coming down and consumers being able to take advantage of that when they do come down

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