The U.S. economy shrank at a 0.5% annual pace from January through March as President Donald Trump's import taxes at least temporarily disrupted business, the Commerce Department reported Thursday in a a downgrade from its previous estimate. First-quarter growth sank under a surge of imports as companies in the United States rushed to bring in foreign goods before Trump could impose tariffs on them. The Commerce Department previously estimated that the economy fell 0.2% in the first quarter. The January-March drop in gross domestic product — the nation's output of goods and services — reversed a 2.4% increase in the last three months of 2024 and marked the first time in three years that the economy contracted.

The U.S. economy expanded at a healthy annual 2.4% pace the last three months of 2024, supported by a year-end surge in consumer spending. But it's unclear whether the United States can sustain solid growth as President Donald Trump wages trade wars, purges the federal workforce and promises mass deportations of immigrants working in the country illegally.

Latinas contributed $1.3 trillion to the U.S. gross domestic product in 2021, up from $661 billion in 2010 and at a growth rate nearly triple that of non-Latinos during the same time period, according to a new report funded by Bank of America and conducted by professors at California Lutheran University and UCLA. The report was compiled using publicly available economic and demographic data from U.S. agencies and shows "that Latinas are drivers of economic vitality in the United States, giving life to the U.S. economy," says one of the study's authors.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. economy grew at a 2.6% annual rate from July through September, snapping two straight quarters of contraction and o…