EconomicCrisis.US

U.S. consumer prices were flat for a second straight month in December as gasoline fell and food rose moderately, government data showed on Thursday, suggesting scope for further monetary easing should economic growth falter.

The Labor Department said its Consumer Price Index was unchanged. Economists polled by Reuters had expected prices to edge up 0.1%.

Core CPI – excluding food and energy — inched up 0.1% after rising up 0.2% in November. That was in line with economists’ expectations.

Although growth gained pace in the fourth-quarter, the recovery is expected to lose a step in the first half of this year mostly due to the debt crisis in Europe, which is already impacting on exports.
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How can we ease Americans’ financial pain and help “return the nation to a “full employment economy”? That’s a question with no easy answers, notes former President Bill Clinton — but government and business leaders can start truly addressing the economic crisis by “building a world of shared prosperity and shared responsibility,” he said during a speech at the National Retail Federation’s annual convention in New York Monday.

In his speech, Clinton offered up some wide-ranging prescriptions for curing the nation’s ailing economy, among them investing in new sectors for job growth — for example, retrofitting buildings so that they’re energy-efficient — supporting high-end manufacturing in the U.S., lowering the tax rate for businesses so they can reinvest in job creation, and “accelerating the resolution of the mortgage crisis” by helping people who owe more on their homes than they’re worth. One way would be to lower the principals on those loans to the value of the homes, he said.
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While business and consumer spending are helping revive the U.S. economy, less than 10 percent of metropolitan areas have recouped all the jobs lost during the recession that ended in 2009, a report found.

Only 26 of the nation’s 363 metropolitan areas have seen employment rebound to pre-recession peaks, according to the report, prepared by forecaster IHS Global Insight and released by the U.S. Conference of Mayors today. Nearly 80 areas aren’t expected to see such a recovery for more than five years.
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In 1939, when John Steinbeck completed The Grapes of Wrath—a heart-wrenching tale of a family of sharecroppers forced out of their home during the Depression— roughly one-quarter of the U.S. population still lived on farms. Today, family farms are increasingly rare, and less than 2 percent of employed Americans work in agriculture.

But rather than viewing the decline of farming jobs as a tragedy, economists almost invariably count agriculture as a shining American success—the triumph of productivity. And why not? A handful of farmers using GPS-equipped combines and sophisticated moisture sensors can grow far more food than the population of an entire rural county in 1939. Food has become so plentiful and cheap in the United States that it has been blamed for the increase in obesity. And agricultural products have become one of the country’s chief exports, totaling more than $115 billion in 2010.
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