EconomicCrisis.US

The U.S. banking industry may have pulled back from the brink, but finance executives say they still face hurdles that will tighten credit and delay an economic rebound.

In recent months the industry has shown signs of recovery from the worst recession in 70 years, which crushed some of the nation’s biggest banks and forced others to write down tens of billions of dollars in toxic assets.

But with banks reluctant to lend and consumers afraid of borrowing, chances of a strong and quick economic recovery are slim, bankers and investors said at the Reuters Global Finance Summit this week.
Read the rest of this entry »

Historically, the U.S. stock market has been one of the key leading indicators of a U.S. economic rebound.

With the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index up more than 60% from its March lows – and the Dow Jones Industrial Average up nearly 40% – prognosticators are finally confident that the U.S. economy will dodge the “double-dip” recession that has been the focus of much fear since the Bush and Obama administrations launched their financial counterattacks on the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

But those same forecasters are reluctant to forecast a sharp economic rebound for 2010. In fact, as opposed to a classic “V-shaped” economic recovery that would accelerate as the year goes on, many economists are predicting that the rate of growth will slow as the New Year unfolds.
Read the rest of this entry »

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the U.S. economy was in recession from March 2001 to November 2001.  The economy eventually recovered from that downturn, but jobs were slow to be created in that recovery.

In fact, it took until June 2003 before the number of employed people in the civilian labor force equaled the number seen at the start of that recession.  June 2003 — or 19 months after the 2001 recession was deemed to be officially over — was also the month the unemployment rate peaked at 6.3%.

These statistics play a large role in why the period after the end of the 2001 recession is commonly referred to as a jobless recovery.
Read the rest of this entry »

For President Barack Obama, it sometimes seems everything is a national crisis – until it’s not.

We have a glut of crises: crises everywhere. We have a national swine flu emergency, a national health care catastrophe, an international panic attack in climate change. Until recently, we had a national economic emergency.

Now, the president said last week, things economic seemed to have turned the corner. The Great Recession is over, the Gross Domestic Product grew by 3.5 percent the last quarter, compared to a .7 percent decline the previous quarter, and, while unemployment might still be high and times might still be tough, the president’s stimulus plan is working exactly as it was intended, having directly created or saved 650,000 jobs and on track to create or save a total of 3.5 million by the end of 2010.
Read the rest of this entry »