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From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

The U.S. economy shrinks in the first quarter of 2025 amid President Trump's tariff shock to business and trade. Though the job market

keeps plugging along and parsing these official numbers through the tariff distortions,

it's not an easy feat. Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson

with the Wall Street Journal. We're joined today by my colleagues, columnist Kim Strassel,

and editorial board member Manet Uquay-Berrua. A conventional definition of a recession is two

consecutive quarters of declining gross domestic product. And as of Wednesday,

the U.S. now has one of them in the can, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, saying this week that

GDP contracted in the first three months of 2025 by an annualized rate of 0.3%. But the hard question seems to be what is coming in the second quarter.

Some suggestions in the data of slowing consumer spending.

And get this, in the first quarter, imported goods rose by about 51%.

Kim, what is the way that you read this data? That last figure suggests to me that

there was a lot of effort by companies to front-run tariffs that were announced by the Trump

administration and quick get everything off the ships and over the border and through customs

before those border taxes take effect. That's the best,

likeliest read of what we are seeing here in these numbers. You know, when you are calculating

GDP, you essentially add up all the activity in the United States. You subtract imports.

And that import number was extraordinary. It subtracted more than 5% from the GDP number. And just the fact that it was such a huge

increase over the prior month and the prior quarter, it's a really strong indication that there was

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