The shutdown-delayed federal data train kept rolling today, giving a bit more insight into where the economy stood a few months ago.

In the third quarter — that’s July, August, and September — the U.S. economy was growing pretty fast. Gross domestic product rose 4.3%, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. That’s the highest quarterly GDP growth in two years and it was boosted mostly by consumer spending. 

But GDP data has been a bit noisy all year, as the Trump administration’s tariff policies have made for big swings in imports and exports.

There’s one number deep in the GDP report that a lot of economists like to look at to get a real sense of how the economy is doing.

“This is the real final sales to private domestic purchasers, which is a mouthful,” said Shannon Grein, an economist at Wells Fargo. 

What this real final sales number measures is basically just consumer spending and investments made by private companies. And in the third quarter, this number, real final sales was up 3%. That’s pretty good.

“You had this underlying domestic spending that just kind of continued to grow at a pretty robust clip through Q3,” Grein said.

Despite lots of people feeling pretty bad about the economy, we just keep spending. 

“I sort of think of this as a continuation of a theme in the post pandemic world where households are just going to continue to spend until they’re somewhat forced not to,” Grein said.

Some people are reaching that point, said Michael Pearce, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics. Despite upward momentum in the economy…

“A lot of that momentum hasn’t really been matched by income growth in the third quarter. I think that’s telling us something about the shape of the consumer and who is behind some of that strength,” he said.

It’s telling us that the economy is splitting.

“Higher income households versus lower income, older households versus younger households, those with a job versus those without the job,” Pearce said.

And this unevenness isn’t just among households, it’s happening among businesses and sectors too. Mike Fratantoni, chief economist at the Mortgage Bankers Association, said take, for example, capital investment.

“Lots of spending on new AI related development, but other aspects of construction really have cut back,” he said.

Aspects like homebuilding and construction of commercial buildings that aren’t data centers. But spending by certain businesses, consumers and the government kept the economy running through the end of September. Steven Blitz, chief U.S. economist at GlobalData TS Lombard though, is skeptical that this can continue. 

“You just simply can’t have overall robust spending in an environment where payrolls are declining,” he said.

And according to the latest job numbers, payrolls haven’t really expanded since April.

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