EconomicCrisis.US

The U.S. economy’s uneven recovery from the Great Recession was the No. 1 business story of 2010, according to a survey of editors by The Associated Press in which I participated.

Nothing else was close.

The economy has been the biggest story of the past 2½ years, ever since that fateful weekend in September 2008 when it became startlingly clear that Wall Street giant Lehman Brothers was going to fail. In the weeks that followed, the financial system came close to melting down and a recession that had begun rather quietly a few months earlier suddenly got a whole lot noisier — and worse.
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2011 should be a happy new year for the U.S. economy, according to forecasts from mainstream economists, although their predictions over the past several years have been about as accurate as the local weatherman’s.

Most economists predict growth in the range of 3 percent next year. The more optimistic ones see 4 percent.

That’s a remarkably positive outlook compared to the past three years, but it’s not enough to push unemployment down much.

“The story for growth I think is really quite simple. You come into this period with massive headwinds … so you’re almost guaranteed a weak recovery,” said Ethan Harris, the head of developed markets economics in New York for Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Research.
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The dollar fluctuated against the euro and the yen after a report showed the U.S. economy expanded at a slower pace than forecast.

The U.S. currency was mixed versus its major counterparts after the Commerce Department said gross domestic product rose at a 2.6 percent annual rate in the third quarter, compared with the 2.8 percent pace forecast by 71 economists in a Bloomberg News survey. The euro gained as German import prices in November climbed the most in a decade. The Swiss franc strengthened to a record against the common currency for a sixth day on refuge demand link to the euro zone’s sovereign-debt crisis.
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Economic turmoil has wreaked havoc on the US execution industry, latest figures show, with the total number of prisoners put to death well down on last year.

The Death Penalty Information Centre’s annual report showed 49 executions were carried out across the US last year, a 12 per cent drop compared to 2009. Even more dramatic, the number of executions was 50 per cent lower than in 1999.

At the same time, there were 114 inmates added to death row, compared to 112 last year, and 234 in 2000.
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