The economy is crashing as well
This slow down is the reason why the employment numbers have been so bad. It's going to effect the deficit and would even have a greater effect if the Fed wasn't keeping the interest rates so low.
But notice the pro democrat positve spin Rueters puts on it. Showing a picture of an auto assembly and starting the article off by saying:
'The U.S. economy contracted at a much steeper pace in the first quarter
than previously estimated, turning in one of its worst-ever non-recession
performances, but growth already appears to have rebounded strongly.'
Rueters doesn't know the difference between propaganda and news reporting.
They experts are expecting a nice rebound of 4%. But that isn't very good coming off -2.9%. If we had 4% for the last 3 quarters we still might not reach the underwhelming 2% predicted by the monetary fund.
They talk about creating 200,000 jobs a month. That's nothing to brag about. This is our 5th year of this recovery and we still haven't averaged that for a calendar year. Only about 190,000 avg. in 2013, the fourth year of recovery. In 2005 we averaged 210,000, also the fourth year of a recovery. But then we had a working population that was about 8% less. Even more importantly, we weren't working our way out of a very steep recession of high unemployment rates and highly negative GDP numbers. Then factor in the higher labor participation rate we had then. In other words, their wasn't nearly as much room available to improve.