Construction Spending Stumbled

According to the latest Commerce data, construction spending declined 0.9 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $1.282 trillion in March.

The drop was bigger than economists had previously forecasted by five basis points. All residential construction spending was down by 1.8 percent over the previous month and 8.4 percent annually. Overall private sector construction was down 0.7 percent from February and 3.6 percent year-over-year, MarketWatch reports.

In March, the Commerce Department revised previous’ months data, a task that hadn’t been done so far this year because of the government shutdown in December and January. The agency now estimates that construction outlays through the first three months of the year are 0.2 percent lower than during the same period in 2018.

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