I say "on balance" because a number of unusual factors have been influencing the pattern of economic activity lately, adding to the normal difficulty of discerning underlying trends from inherently volatile data and other information.
These factors include not only last year's devastating hurricanes but also the unusually warm weather in the early part of this year, which very likely provided a fillip to housing construction and consumer spending. Smoothing through these events, however, the economy has been expanding at a pretty good clip by historical standards--probably an annual rate of about 3-1/2 percent since midyear 2005.