The US economy met the technical definition of a recession when GDP fell in both the first and second quarters of the year, but it didn’t feel like a real downturn. Consumer spending and business capital expenditure rose, while the economy created more than 3.5mn jobs. Instead, it was volatility in trade and inventories, a legacy of the long-running supply chain problems around the globe, that led to the contraction. But the picture has begun to look quite different through the third quarter. Overall GDP grew by 2.6% on an annualised basis, with net trade doing a lot of the leg work. But this decent headline reading ... (full story)