Posted on Sunday, 12th December 2010 by Emily Smith
THE news out of the American economy keeps getting better and better. The country’s trade deficit has fallen thanks to improved exports. Retail sales are beating expectations. Industrial production has been growing steadily, and service sector activity is growing at an increasing rate. Consumer confidence is up. And the Dow Jones Industrial Index has finally regained all the ground lost after August of 2008. The deal on extension of the Bush tax cuts led some major macroeconomic forecasters to revise 2011 growth expectations up to around 4%. The retail sales surprise this week led to similar upward revisions for fourth quarter output. It seems, at last, that good times are here again.
Except. Unemployment is at 9.8%. Over 6m Americans have been out of work for more than 6 months. Some 2m jobless workers will exhaust unemployment benefits by the end of 2010. Housing prices, nationally, are falling once again. Nearly 11m households have mortgages larger than the value of their homes. Consumers are still heavily indebted, which will constrain further growth in spending.
Happy third birthday, erica.biz! It seems like yesterday that I decided to change my little personal blog into a powerhouse business blog with a real community behind it. When I launched erica.biz on December 4, 2007, I wasn’t sure where it would go. A lot of people held the opinion that the blogosphere was “saturated.” What I learned was that a new perspective–if it’s fresh and interesting–is always welcomed.