Sales suffered during what it called a challenging holiday season. more on how other retailers are doing at the moment. looking at markets around the world to close out the week, asian markets closed up. china is closed for the lunar new year. wall street, stock index futures barely moving here but leaning lower after gains thursday. gdp grew stronger than expected 2.9%. you can see that s slowing from the second quarter but clearly recovering from a stall in the first half of the year. despite daily news of layoffs in tech, the overall job market remains tight. weekly unemployment filings are the lowest since april. on inflation watch, gas prices rose at $3.51 a gallon. chipotle is hiring 1500 people ahead of the burrito season.
Cooling off because last june we had 7% inflation. it has ticked down to 5%, and this slowdown in inflation, if it continues, this could give the fed the cover it needs and wants to try to slow the pace of interest rate hikes at next week s meeting and maybe even pause altogether this spring. we do need to keep an eye on consumer spending though because spending dipped last month as people were dealing with inflation. peoples a saved more money. they re setting aside extra money for a rainy day, and hopefully we get to see inflation calm down some more and consumer spending can tick up because we need consumer spending to get this expansion to continue. let s talk about gas prices. they re going up again. what s the story? they are going up, but this is unusual, the timing here. the national average is at $3.51 a gallon, up 41 cents in the past month.
Enforcement Directorate (ED) has seized gold worth Rs 2.51 crore from the premises of an alleged beneficiary of Kerala s gold smuggling case in Malappuram under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002, the official said on Wednesday.
After the high-voltage campaigning, the countdown has begun for the high-stakes political battle to conclude in Gujarat, with the final phase of polling for the ongoing Assembly elections to be held on Monday.
The strategic promote yum releases are bringing down prices? far enough. the president is claiming his actions have brought gas prices down to where they were before covid arrived. gas prices are continuing to go down and because they re going down we are making serious progress in getting prices close to what they were before the pandemic. that was today s and that is a stretch. gas right before covid was about $2.51 a gallon for regular, that s way lower than what consumers are playing now. we learned when president biden met with saudi arabia leaders he was focusing on oil prices, the new york times is reporting about that trip believing it could convince opec to increase production as russias war in ukraine had led to surging