The World Bank said on Tuesday that the global economy remained in a “precarious state” and warned of sluggish growth this year and next as rising interest rates slow consumer spending and business investment, and threaten the stability of the financial system. The bank’s tepid forecasts in its latest Global Economic Prospects report highlight the […]
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Americans’ income and spending both rose in April, a sign of economic resilience amid rising prices and warnings of a possible recession. Consumer spending increased 0.8 percent in April, the Commerce Department said Friday. The uptick followed a two-month slump in spending and exceeded forecasters’ expectations. After-tax income rose 0.4 percent, fueled by a strong […]
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Why It Matters: Exports, a big driver of the economy, are down. Germany is Europe’s largest economy and its health directly affects the health of the 20-member eurozone and the wider European Union, the world’s third-largest economy, after the United States and China, in terms of output and purchasing power, according to the World Bank. […]
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Almost a year has passed since the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that the U.S. economy had contracted for two quarters in a row. Some people believe, wrongly, that two quarters of falling G.D.P. is the official definition of a recession. Economic negativity ran rampant, especially but not only on the political right. The interesting […]
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The labor market is still defying gravity — for now. Employers added 253,000 jobs in April on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department reported Friday, in a departure from the cooling trend that had marked the first quarter and was expected to continue. The unemployment rate was 3.4 percent, down from 3.5 percent in […]
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The Federal Reserve’s push to slow the economy and bring inflation under control is often compared to an airplane descent, one that could end in a soft landing, a bumpy one or an outright crash. Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, is betting on something more akin to the Miracle on the Hudson: a touchdown […]
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The pandemic had a bright silver lining for Elkhart, Ind. The city, renowned as the capital of recreational vehicle production, had a surge in demand as cooped-up families took to the highways and avoided hotels. The cluster of manufacturers enjoyed record profits, and workers benefited as well: The metropolitan area’s unemployment rate sank to 1 […]
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WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve officials are widely expected to lift borrowing costs by a quarter of a percentage point on Wednesday, the 10th consecutive rate increase since March 2022. But investors and economists think that this could be the central bank’s last move before it pauses. Fed officials face a complicated backdrop going into this […]
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Regulators had indicated that they planned to announce a winner by 8 p.m., before markets in Asia opened. PNC executives had spent much of the weekend at the bank’s Pittsburgh headquarters putting together its bid. Executives at Citizens, which is based in Providence, R.I., gathered in offices in Connecticut and Massachusetts. But 8 p.m. rolled […]
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The bureau doesn’t rush in making these judgments. We won’t know for sure that we’ve had a recession until well after it’s started, and, quite probably, not until long after it’s ended. That’s what happened for the last recession. It started in February 2020, near the beginning of the pandemic, and ended in April 2020. […]
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Wage growth remained strong in early 2023 — good news for workers trying to keep up with the rising cost of living, but a likely source of concern for Federal Reserve officials as they try to tamp down inflation without causing a recession. Wages and salaries for private-sector U.S. workers were up 5.1 percent in […]
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Over a few days in early March, carmakers and limousine company operators gathered at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas for an annual convention, where they went to panels and parties and admired shiny new party buses, vans and black sport utility vehicles. But something was missing. “There wasn’t one stretch limousine on the show […]
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Joe Biden has, to nobody’s surprise, formally announced that he is seeking re-election. And I, for one, am dreading the year and a half of political crystal ball gazing that lies ahead of us — a discussion to which I will have little if anything to add. One thing I may be able to contribute […]
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Government data on Thursday is expected to show that higher interest rates are taking a toll on the U.S. economy, but that free-spending consumers are keeping a recession at bay, at least for now. Gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, probably rose at a rate of about 1.9 percent in the first quarter of the […]
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There are two starkly different ways of looking at the U.S. economy right now: what the data says has happened in the past few months, and what history warns could happen next. Most of the recent data suggests that the economy is strong. The job market is, incredibly, better today than it was in February […]
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As the country’s largest companies prepare to report their results for the start of the year — offering a view into how the economy is faring as a banking shock reverberates — they’re already warning investors to brace themselves. For the big businesses that make up the S&P 500 index, Wall Street’s forecasters expect that […]
Read MoreCalifornia has often been at the country’s economic forefront. Now, as fears of a national recession continue to nag, the state is hoping not to lead the way there. While the California economy maintains its powerhouse status, outranking even those of most countries, the state’s most-powerful sectors — including tech companies and supply chain logistics […]
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Gradually slowing job gains and a growing labor force in March delivered welcome news to President Biden, nearly a year after he declared that the job market needed to cool significantly to tame high prices. “This is a good jobs report for hard-working Americans,” Mr. Biden said in a written statement on Friday morning. But […]
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Despite the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the shock waves it sent through the banking sector — due, in part, to the bank’s risky exposure to higher interest rates — the Federal Reserve raised interest rates again, the ninth increase in the past year. Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Fed, has made one […]
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WASHINGTON — Cecilia Rouse, the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, stepped down on Friday to return to teaching at Princeton University. As a going-away present fit for an economist, her staff presented her with a chart showing every previous chair of the council, ranked by the number of jobs created during […]
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In the typically tame market for government bonds, investors have been left reeling from some of the most chaotic trading conditions they have ever seen, entrenching concerns about the broader economy since the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. It’s the kind of trading that makes the often more turbulent stock market seem calm: While the […]
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The fallout from the recent banking crisis spurred by the collapse of two banks — and concerns about the health of a third — is bubbling up in the market for commercial real estate lending, as borrowers fear that banks will pull back. That could slow down construction activity and increase the likelihood of a […]
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WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve’s decision on Wednesday on whether to raise rates at a precarious moment carries risks not just for the central bank, but also for President Biden. Mr. Biden was already relying on the Fed to maintain a delicate balance with its interest rate decisions, simultaneously taming rapid price growth while avoiding plunging the […]
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The U.S. economic recovery has repeatedly defied predictions of an impending recession, withstanding supply-chain backlogs, labor shortages, global conflicts and the fastest increase in interest rates in decades. That resilience now faces a new test: a banking crisis that, at times over the past week, seemed poised to turn into a full-blown financial meltdown as […]
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After an explosion in job growth at the start of the year, new data on Friday will show whether employers moderated their hiring in February — and whether any slowdown was enough to fundamentally upend the labor market’s momentum. Forecasters estimate that the economy added 225,000 positions last month, which would constitute a return to […]
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The debate on Wall Street over the prospects for the American economy moved decidedly back toward the gloomy this week, as investors again recalibrated their expectations for how high interest rates could go. The shift came after the Federal Reserve’s chair, Jerome H. Powell, speaking to lawmakers on Tuesday, said the central bank might have […]
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WASHINGTON — The U.S. economy could quickly shed a million jobs and fall into recession if lawmakers fail to raise the nation’s borrowing limit before the federal government exhausts its ability to pay its bills on time, the chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, Mark Zandi, will warn a Senate panel on Tuesday. The damage could spiral to seven […]
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During the height of the pandemic, hungry and housebound customers clamored for Home Run Inn Pizza’s frozen thin-crust pies. The company did everything to oblige. It kept its machines chugging during lunch breaks and brought on temporary workers to ensure it could produce pizzas at the suddenly breakneck pace. More recently, demand has eased, and […]
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It’s a notable upgrade from the bank’s forecast in November, when it expected a contraction of 1.5 percent. Britain is expected to experience only a shallow recession, far less severe than the one after the 2008 financial crisis or in the early 1990s, because unemployment is forecast to increase less than previously thought and traders […]
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Many economists and investors had a clear narrative coming into 2023: The Federal Reserve had spent months pushing borrowing costs rapidly higher in a bid to tame inflation, and those moves were expected to slow growth and the labor market so much that the economy would be at risk of plunging into a downturn. But […]
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I don’t know whether there will be any surprises in the State of the Union address. I do know that the background to the speech will be very different from what a great majority of pundits expected just a few months ago. After all, at this point Joe Biden’s presidency was supposed to be effectively […]
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