U.S. economy shrank by 0.7 percent in first quarter

last updated 29 May 2015

The resurgent U.S. economy might not be surging after all. The U.S. Commerce Department said on Friday that the country's gross domestic product contracted by 0.7 percent in the first quarter, instead of growing by 0.2 percent, as it had previously reported. Economists blamed the news on bad winter weather and trade imbalances caused by a strong dollar.

"This isn't the off-to-the-races kind of expansion we envisioned six months ago," Scott Anderson, chief economist at Bank of the West in San Francisco, told The New York Times. Citing a shrinking unemployment rate and a housing market comeback, other economists cautioned against reading too much into the numbers.