Here's what kept GDP climbing last summer

You got your lagging economic indicators, and then you got your lagging economic indicators. From American public media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Risdall. It is Thursday today, twenty two January. Good as always to have you along, everybody. The macroeconomic news of the day is brought to us today by the letters p, c, and e, the personal consumption expenditures price index. It is for November, mind you, so a bit delayed. Thanks, shutdown. Came in this morning at 2.8% that is higher by just a tetch from October. I'm Nina Ihecker, and I am an associate professor of economics at the University of Rhode Island. I'm Laura Velcamp, and I'm the Cooperman professor of economics and finance at Columbia Business School. You can also just shorten that to Columbia Business School professor or Columbia professor. Noted. Services, shelter, and food are still really expensive, and they're not slowing. We also have had consistently strong demand in the past few months, you know, surprisingly strong given everything that happened in the preceding year economically. Now caveat emptor because, again, November. It's not really a snapshot of what prices are doing today. It's a snapshot of what prices were doing, you know, in October and November, when, you know, when much of this data was collected. The changes are probably bigger than they look if these are part of a trend and that trend was persisting from November to December. PCE matters to all of us, of course, because PCE matters to the Federal Reserve. Measure is a little bit broader than some of the other measures of prices that sample a narrower set of goods. While the CPI might include things that are really important, it might not include everything that a household necessarily cares about. The flexibility of the PCE lets economists reflect changes in preferences. Preferences like buying chicken instead of beef because beef is so expensive right now. The substitution effect is what economists call that. PCE coming in the way it did today, by the buy, that is higher, makes the Fed's interest rate meeting next week a teeny bit more predictable, by which I mean a lot more predictable. Odds of a rate cut are going way down. That said, economic growth has been going up or at least it was in the third quarter of last year, July through September. Thanks again. Shut down. 4.4% was the annual rate of growth in this economy back then, better than we'd initially thought and better than the 3.8% growth in q two. You drill down into the data as we are want to do around here, and you'll find one of the big contributors to that growth is private sector services. Think finance and tech and insurance. Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes is on it. Cornell trade economist Ishwar Prasad says he is one of the reasons why the tech industry is adding to GDP growth. He spends a lot of time analyzing giant …