Do you want a roaring economy or do you want rate cuts? Because you can’t have both. Unless you’re Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

On Thursday, the Census Bureau said nominal spending across the world’s largest economy rose 0.6% in June from May, and at the same rate excluding sales of cars and gas.

“Remarkable” might be too strong to describe the result, so I’ll call it “impressive” instead. Consensus expected just 0.1% from the headline readout, so 0.6% counted as a huge beat. Economists wanted 0.3% from the ex-autos/gas print, which means that readout doubled consensus.

Most importantly, the control group posted yet another beat, rising 0.5% against expectations for a 0.3% advance. That’ll help Q2 GDP tracking, although May’s control group reading was revised lower to show a more muted 0.2% advance versus the initially-reported 0.4% clip.

Only two of 13 categories showed a decline in nominal spending for June. Oddly enough, they were both categories where you’d expect tariffs to push up prices (furniture and electronics stores). Spending on clothing rose a strong 0.9% and the restaurant and bars line, the only services category in the release, showed a 0.6% advance.

Unless you want to say higher nominal spending is just evidence that tariffs are pushing up prices, this release argued against the notion that consumers are retrenching.

Meanwhile, jobless claims fell again to just 221,000 for the week to July 12. That’s the lowest in 13 weeks, and it undershot consensus by a mile. Economists expected 233,000. As the simple figure below shows, we’re in free fall on the initial filers headline.

The four-week moving average is now 229,500, the lowest since May 3.

Continuing claims were 1.956 million in the week to July 5, up slightly from the prior week but lower than expected.

Exactly none of the above argues for rate cuts, but… well, this White House will be calling for rate cuts up to and until there’s no more room to cut.