Tag: U.S. economy

U.S. Economy Adds 80,000 Jobs

In the month of October, the U.S. economy added 80,000 jobs, and unemployment rates fell slightly, from 9.1% to 9.0%, revealing that while the going is slow, the world’s greatest economy is on a stable path to recovery.

Furthermore, the economy did not falter in the face of August’s incidents, including the downgrade to the US credit rating and the EU debt crisis. Still, the pace of recovery remains slow.

The revisions of the past few months reveal the risk of depending on the initial employment data.

“You want to see revisions to the upside if one expects firming labor conditions. Weaker labor markets normally create downward revisions. The trend is moving in the right direction,” said Eric Green of TD Securities in New York.

 

Tim Kane on Economic Blogging

Top economic bloggers throughout the U.S. have revealed relatively gloomy outlooks on the country’s economy, but have also expressed original viewpoints and ideas regarding solutions to the problem. The most-preferred policy option to stimulate the economy was to “remove restrictions on who can be ‘accredited’ investors.” More than 70% of blogging participants also showed their support for the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would up more domestic areas to oil and gas exploration and drilling.

According to Tim Kane of the Kauffman Foundation, “The economics blogging community has proven to be very insightful with rich and diverse viewpoints, but by nature they understand the importance of entrepreneurship because that’s ultimately who they are.

“We’ve been fortunate to aggregate the insights of top economic bloggers, including expert scholars such as Jim Hamilton at UCSD and Brad Delong at UC Berkley, but also popular commentators outside of the ivory tower, with powerful results,” he added.

U.S. Economy Showing Signs of Recession

While the U.S. economy is on the brink of a recession, the economy did expand at a .6% annual pace during the first quarter. Mark Vitner, a senior economist at Wachovia Corp. in Charlotte, North Carolina, said that, “If you were to take out the swing in inventories, these numbers would be negative.” In an interview with Bloomberg Television, he continued by saying,“We think we’re in recession, but I don’t know that the GDP numbers are going to turn negative at all in 2008.”

The largest part of the economy, household spending, grew during the last quarter at the slowest rate that it has since 2001, during the time when the U.S. was in a recession.