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2010 Economy Changed Many Americans' Lives
November 30, 2010
The Great Recession officially ended in September. But unemployment remains high, foreclosures continue and President Obama has called for a two-year pay freeze for federal workers. Steven Greenhouse of the New York Times talks about the year's economy.
TONY COX, host:
This is TALK OF THE NATION. Im Tony Cox in Washington. Neal Conan is away.
America's Great Recession officially ended in September, but the still-lagging economy hasn't made much hasn't made life much easier. High unemployment continues to force many Americans into difficult decisions on small and sometimes large scales. And what are people doing to get by? And what is the country's economic outlook?
President Obama just announced a two-year freeze on federal wages, another in a series of signs that things aren't getting better fast enough.
New York Times labor and workplace correspondent Steven Greenhouse is here to help us take the nation's economic temperature.
What are some of the significant changes the economy has forced you to make this year that you hadn't foreseen? Tell us your story. Our number here in Washington: 800-989-8255. Our email address is talk@npr.org. And you can join the conversation at our website. Just go to npr.org, and click on TALK OF THE NATION.
Later in the hour, questions and answers on the new recommendations on vitamin D. But first, Steven Greenhouse joins me right here in Studio A. Steven, nice to have you.
Mr. STEVEN GREENHOUSE (New York Times): Nice to be here, Tony.
COX: Once again, I should say - 2010, let's begin there, almost over. What were the big changes Americans felt in the economy in 2010? And before you answer, maybe that's an assumption that shouldn't even be made, that there were changes.
Mr. GREENHOUSE: Well, in ways, the big change, Tony, was that people were expecting things to get better early in the year, and then the economy really didn't go very, you know, didn't go very far, didn't improve nearly as much as they hoped.
I think maybe the big change is declining expectations. We're about to enter December, and the recession began almost exactly three years ago, in December of '07. So here we are having gone, you know, nearly 36 months with the economy kind of in the dumps.
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GDP Growth Fastest Since Early 2010
January 27, 2012
Today the Commerce Department announced that GDP increased by 2.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011. The figure comes in just shy of experts' projections of 3 percent, but is also far stronger than the previous quarter's 1.8 percent.
Evidence of stronger economic growth is a welcome change. Nearly three years into the recovery, slow growth and constant prognostications about the prospects for recovery have become a fact of life in the U.S. Below we debunk three common misconceptions about when and how a strong recovery might finally take shape.
[See why the Federal Reserve is holding interest rates so low.]
The Recovery Is Going Unusually, Alarmingly Slow
Uncomfortably slow? Certainly. But plenty of economists are not surprised by the snail's pace of job and GDP growth that the United States has taken since the Great Recession. In their 2009 book This Time Is Different, Peterson Institute for International Economics Senior Fellow Carmen Reinhart and Harvard University Professor of Economics Kenneth Rogoff point out that recessions following financial crises are often particularly deep, making for recoveries that are especially prolonged. It is "the extraordinary depth of the recessions...not the slow recoveries thereafter" that lead to the long recovery periods after financial crises, said Princeton Economics Professor Alan Blinder, echoing Reinhart and Rogoff's book, at a Senate Budget Committee hearing Thursday about the economic outlook. "It takes a long time to climb out because the hole is so deep, not because the ascent is so slow," he added.
Consumers Help Drive U.S. Economy to 3.2% Growth Rate
April 30, 2010
The United States economy has expanded for three quarters in a row, the Commerce Department said on Friday, helped along by consumer spending. Now the question is, Will the jobs follow?
The broadest measure of the overall economy grew at an inflation-adjusted annual rate of 3.2 percent in the first quarter of 2010, the Commerce Department reported. It had expanded 5.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 and 2.2 percent in the third quarter.
While the expansion is welcome, it has not delivered the level of hiring needed to recover the ground lost during the recession.
Speaking in the Rose Garden on Friday, President Obama acknowledged that many Americans might find little comfort in the numbers because “ ‘you’re hired’ is the only economic news they’re waiting to hear.”
Still, economists are hopeful that news of solid, continued growth may bolster business confidence and persuade more companies to expand.
“It’s been a case of, when will they stop worrying and learn to love the boom?” said Robert J. Barbera, chief economist at ITG, who added that many analysts and companies had underestimated the economic turnaround.
After dragging their heels for many months, consumers were at last a major contributor to economic growth in the first quarter. Consumer spending grew at an annual rate of 3.6 percent, a big gain from the 1.6 percent rate of the previous three months. Purchases of durable goods like cars led the way.
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Whether Americans might retrench for the long haul after seeing their homes lose value has been one of the biggest questions about the aftermath of the Great Recession. Consumer spending makes up more than 70 percent of the economy, and it usually drives growth during economic recoveries.
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Gulf oil spill: What's at stake
May 30, 2010
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The numbers being batted around when it comes to how much the oil spill will ultimately cost BP and the local Gulf of Mexico economies are huge. $3 billion. $14 billion. One politician put it at over $100 billion.
The range is so big because two important questions remain unanswered: When will the leak be sealed, and will most of the oil wash ashore? Until those are answered no one will know the pricetag of the damages for sure.
But there have been studies done looking at what's broadly at stake, and the number is quite large indeed.
The four biggest industries in the Gulf of Mexico are oil, tourism, fishing and shipping, and they account for some $234 billion in economic activity each year, according to a 2007 study done by regional scholars and published by Texas A&M University Press.
Two thirds of that amount is in the United States, with the other third in Mexico.
If the Gulf of Mexico were a country, it would be the 29th largest economy in the world.
Oil and gas
Ironically, the largest chunk of that money is generated by the oil and gas industry, and they may ultimately be the ones that lose the most.
Oil and gas interests generate $124 billion or 53% of the total money, according to Jim Cato, a former economics professor at the University of Florida and one of the authors on the study.
As of Thursday, all new offshore drilling in U.S. waters in the Gulf remained closed following the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig last month, which claimed 11 lives and left an uncapped oil well leaking thousands of gallons a day into the water.
Oil production from existing wells has been largely unaffected and drillers have been busying themselves with wells begun before the explosion. But the longer the ban remains intact, the harder the economic bite.