WASHINGTON (AP) — Buoyed by consumer spending, the U.S. economy likely continued to expand at a healthy pace between July and September despite pressure from still high interest rates.

The Commerce Department is expected to report Wednesday that gross domestic product (the economy’s total output of goods and services) grew at an annual rate of 2.6% last quarter, according to a survey of forecasters by the firm FactSet data. This would be lower than the annual rate of 3% in the April-June period. But it would still represent a solid pace as Americans reflect on the state of the economy in the final stretch of the presidential race.

Wednesday’s report is the first of three estimates the government will make on GDP growth for the third quarter of the year. The U.S. economy, the world’s largest, has shown surprising resilience in the face of much higher borrowing rates that the Federal Reserve imposed in 2022 and 2023 as it seeks to curb inflation. Despite widespread predictions that the economy would succumb to a recession, it has continued to grow: Employers continue to hire and consumers continue to spend.

In a sign that the country’s households, whose purchases drive most of the economy, will continue to spend, the Conference Board said Tuesday that its consumer confidence index posted its biggest monthly gain since March 2021. The share of consumers Those expecting a recession in the next 12 months fell to their lowest point since the board first raised that question in July 2022.

At the same time, the country’s once-hot job market has lost some momentum. On Tuesday, the government reported that the number of job openings in the United States fell in September to its lowest level since January 2021. And employers have added an average of 200,000 jobs a month so far this year, a healthy figure but lower than the record 604,000 in 2021 when the economy recovered from the pandemic recession, 377,000 in 2022 and 251,000 in 2023.

On Friday, the Labor Department is expected to report that the economy added 120,000 jobs in October. However, that increase will likely have been significantly slowed by the effects of hurricanes Helene and Milton and a strike at Boeing, the aviation giant, all of which left thousands of people temporarily unemployed.

At its most recent meeting last month, the Federal Reserve was satisfied enough with its progress against inflation (and concerned enough about the labor market slowdown) to cut its benchmark rate by half a percentage point, its first and largest rate cut in more than four years. years. When it meets next week, the Federal Reserve is expected to announce another rate cut, this one to a more typical quarter point.

Officials have also signaled they expect to cut their key rate again at their final two meetings of this year, in November and December. And they anticipate four more rate cuts in 2025 and two in 2026. The cumulative result of the Fed’s rate cuts, over time, will likely be lower borrowing rates for consumers and businesses.

Inflation, which hit a four-decade high of 9.1% in June 2022, has fallen to 2.4%, just above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. But average prices are still far above their pre-pandemic levels, which has exasperated many Americans and posed a challenge to Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential prospects in her race against former President Donald Trump. However, most mainstream economists have suggested that Trump’s policy proposals, unlike Harris’s, would make inflation worse.