The U.S. economy shrank for the first time since the early days of the pandemic, with business activity in the first quarter of 2022 hit by the Omicron wave and the worst inflation on record in four decades. Gross domestic product contracted by an annual 1.4 percent, against analysts’ expectations of a 1 percent gain. That compared with a 6.9 percent rise in the last quarter of 2021, but economists warned against reading too much into the figure and said the United States might still avoid a full-on recession. “This is noise; not signal. The economy is not falling into recession,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. Growth was hit by a slowdown of business investment in inventory and by a fall in defense spending. Consumer spending, a key indicator, rose by 2.7 percent.
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