EconomicCrisis.US

Is the global economy out of the woods? Two years after near-meltdown, with the U.S. looking sluggish, equity markets groggy and Europeans fighting a debt crisis, experts gathered in Italy offered a generally gloomy outlook — especially for the United States and much of the industrialized world.

The doomsayers were led by New York University economist Nouriel Roubini, who warned in booming tones that “there is a significant risk of a double-dip recession in the United States” as well as in Japan and many European countries.
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Should we blame newspapers for talking down the U.S. economy, maybe even to the cusp of a double dip?

That’s the contention of equity bulls. They argue that, despite reasonably solid fundamentals, the media’s unrelenting gloominess about the state of the world is proving a drag on sentiment. Declining consumer and business confidence will then cause a drop in activity, which, in turn, will trigger another recession.

But it’s not true.

The balance of positive to negative news stories about the U.S. economy in the U.S. press in August was the highest it has been since the recession started in December 2007, according to the latest monthly survey of media sentiment, the Dow Jones Economic Sentiment Indicator, which is produced by this newswire. Read our coverage here.
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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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