grew at its fastest pace in almost four years. gdp at 4%. the president said yesterday we will be happy with anything that has a four in front of it. this has a four in front of it, but it s not it s a great number. o it s been accomplished before. the last three presidents have had a 5% reading in a good quarter. will it be a whole year of growth, that remains to be seen. 4.1%, bouncing back from a weak 2% in the first quarter. 9.3% exports gain, that s a really remarkable gain. and as our colleague calls it, not a sugar rush but a soybean rush. you had all these soybean sales ahead of expected retaliation from china. all these orders front loaded.
that could be seen as a one time an artificial ballooning of this. the sugar rush, soybean rush, could come back in the next quarter. tax cuts and businesses are having record profits right now, so you have business investment. consumers, that spending was up about 4%. that s a very strong number. again, a bounce back from kind of a weak first quarter. and that s probably a little bit of those tax cuts and also just confidence confidence for people who are spending more money and government spending about 2%. some of that, a lot of that probably defense spending. you saw that huge spending bill. but the soybean in particular, sibean shipments from 9,400%. and economists now are trying to pick apart what is the