EconomicCrisis.US

U.S. consumer confidence unexpectedly rose to 53.5 in August, the Conference Board said, as Americans became somewhat more positive about the short-term outlook for the economy.

A Bloomberg survey had expected the index to rise to 51.0 in August from 50.4 in July. It hit a record low of 25.3 in April 2009.

In August, two of the index’s three components rose, with consumers’ expectations for both the job market and the future economic conditions showing improvement.

Consumers expecting more jobs in the months ahead rose in August to 14.6% from 14.2% in July, while those anticipating fewer jobs decreased to 19.4% from 20.9%.
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Bigger, as the Federal Reserve may soon discover, is not always better.

The prospect of a renewed effort by the U.S. central bank to drive down already super-low borrowing costs raises the issue of whether such measures can help stimulate a recovery that is faltering due to a lack of consumer demand.

The sorry state of the U.S. economy, despite all the monetary and fiscal firepower the Fed and the Treasury have deployed, already befuddles the experts. Worries about a double-dip recession are rampant, and were the topic du jour at the Fed’s annual Jackson Hole conference.
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Is America Moving Closer to Total Economic Collapse?

If someone had said twenty or thirty years ago that the American financial system would collapse in 2008, few would have believed it. But it did indeed happen. Two years later, the United States is still in serious economic trouble.
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‘This sucker’s going down” was George W Bush’s pithy description of the United States’ economy when the financial crisis of late 2008 threatened to bring down every bank on Wall Street.

Disaster was averted by concerted international cooperation of a sort never seen before and, by the middle of last year, the world’s biggest economy seemed to be on the mend. Factories started to hum again, shares rallied sharply and growth resumed.

The US seemed to be showing its traditional resilience. That judgment now appears premature. The latest US economic data has been poor. Traditionally, the US’s flexible labour market has meant job creation after recession has been robust. This time it was weak even when output was growing strongly in late 2009 and 2010. Recently, it went into reverse.
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