Jobs Data Ups Odds Of Hike
The U.S. job market has almost fully healed from the deep wounds of the Great Recession, raising expectations that the Federal Reserve will begin withdrawing its support for the recovery by the end of the year. Government data released Friday showed that the economy added a blockbuster 271,000 jobs in October — the highest amount this year and beyond analysts’ most optimistic forecasts. The unemployment rate dipped to 5 percent, and...
Economists: Beware New U.S. Recession
Confronted with disappointing data from around the world, economists are whispering a word that hasn’t seemed like a real possibility in years: recession. It starts with the slowdown in China, which is already straining the global recovery. The world’s second-largest economy has lost its appetite for the raw materials that fueled its industrial boom, leaving the smaller countries that supplied it with resources stumbling in its wake....
U.S. Housing-Market Recovery Hits 8-Year High
Washington — America’s housing-market recovery is in full swing. Purchases of previously owned homes climbed 3.2 percent in June to a 5.49 million annualized rate, the strongest since February 2007, the National Association of Realtors said Wednesday. Lean inventory pushed prices to an all-time high and listed properties were snapped up in just 34 days on average, the quickest in four years of record-keeping. A broad-based advance,...
Relax, The Jobs Recovery Is on Track
Washington — The U.S. economy sure is adding a lot of jobs for something that’s not supposed to be growing much, if at all. Specifically, it added 280,000 jobs in May, better than the 225,000 that were expected, and another 32,000 in revisions to previous months. This actually made the unemployment rate tick up to 5.5 percent, though, for the good reason that more people were looking for work — 397,000 more, to be exact — than before....
Most Paychecks Have Yet to Feel The Recovery
The winter of our jobs discontent is over, and the recovery is back to chugging along like it was before. That’s the good and bad news. Before we get to it, though, let’s rewind a little bit. At the end of last year, it looked like the recovery was finally starting to hit a higher gear when it added an average of 324,000 jobs a month. But just as this had begun, it was over. The stronger dollar made our exports less competitive, and...
