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This post was updated at 8:40 a.m. ET

The U.S. economy grew at a better-than-expected 2.8 percent annual rate in the third quarter, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported Thursday morning.

That's a bit faster than the 2.5 percent pace of the second quarter. According to the BEA, consumer spending, inventory investment and exports helped fuel slightly stronger growth.

As we wrote earlier, economists had been expecting to hear that gross domestic product growth slowed from July 1 through Sept. 30, to a 2 percent annual rate. Their prediction may still turn out to be correct: The GDP data will be revised twice; one time each in the next two months.

Also Thursday morning, the Employment and Training Administration said that 336,000 people filed first-time claims for unemployment insurance last week. That was down 9,000 from the week before.

Our original post — Coming Up: First Look At How Economy Fared In Third Quarter:

We'll likely hear this hour that the U.S. economy slowed in the third quarter, with gross domestic product growth at a 2 percent annual rate versus the previous quarter's 2.5 percent, forecasters tell Reuters.

If that is what Bureau of Economic Analysis says when it releases its latest data at 8:30 a.m. ET, it will be confirmation that even before the 16-day partial government shutdown in October, the economy was cooling.

News of slower growth before the shutdown would also support the view of many experts that "it's difficult to see the economy taking off in the near term," Standard Chartered Bank economist Thomas Costerg says in Reuters' report.

This morning's report will be the first of three in coming months about the third quarter. As happened with the second-quarter data, initial estimates are often revised. The bureau initially said growth in the second quarter registered at just a 1.7 percent annual rate. As more data came in, it raised the estimate to that 2.5 percent annual rate.

Also due at 8:30 a.m. ET: The latest data on weekly claims for jobless benefits.

6 p.m. ET: Twitter Shares Close At $44.90

At the end of its first day of public trading, shares of Twitter were valued at $44.90, reflecting a market value of more than $31 billion. The company sold 70 million shares of stock, raising $1.82 billion in the process.

Earlier Thursday, the company's shares soared from their initial public offering price of $26.

2:35 p.m. ET:

As you can see if you click on the player below, Twitter's stock has been trading around $47 a share in recent minutes.

Twitter's stock

Click the 'today' tab in the box below and data on Twitter's stock price should flow in.

The health care exchanges may be open, but there's no question they're still kind of a mess.

"The rollout has been excruciatingly awful for way too many people," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius conceded to the Senate Finance Committee last week.

But mess or not, the law is going forward, people are trying to use it, and they have questions. Here are some of yours, and our answers.

Fran Heyman of Westchester, N.Y., wants to know, "If you are self-employed, is there a cap to how much you can make to use the Affordable Care Act insurance?"

No. There's no upper limit to how much you can earn and still be able to buy health insurance on the exchange. But there is an upper limit on how much you can earn and qualify for a subsidy to help offset the costs. That upper limit is 400 percent of the federal poverty level — about $46,000 in modified adjusted gross income for an individual and about $94,000 for a family of four. If you earn less than those amounts, you can qualify a subsidy that will lower your premiums. Earn more than that, you'll have to pay full freight.

Barbara Lorell of Bremerton, Wash., has the opposite question – what happens if you earn too little? She's a self-employed pet-sitter, and she says her income fluctuates a lot during the year. She wonders what happens if she signs up for a plan on the health exchange and gets federal subsidies to help pay her premiums, but then doesn't end up earning enough and should have been on Medicaid instead. Will she be expected to pay those subsidies back?

“ If you are self-employed, is there a cap to how much you can make to use the Affordable Care Act insurance?