Word: downturns
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...economists generally agree that U.S. business is coming out of its long downturn-but how quickly is it likely to bounce back? TIME editors posed that question last week to the eight experts on the magazine's Board of Economists (see box). Their answers were remarkably similar. Walter Heller summed up: "The U.S. is beginning a long, slow climb back to full employment." The outlook, he said, is for "progress, but stagnancy." All the other members of the board basically concur. They foresee only small rises in production and profits next year, and predict a gradual lessening of inflation...
...that executives have always hated most is firing fellow executives. It is a task that top managements increasingly face as the business downturn and profit squeeze make superfluous executives an insupportable luxury. In July, unemployment among professional and managerial employees rose to 394,000-up 74% from a year earlier. Now, though, a method has been developed to take some of the sting and embarrassment out of executive firing. Instead of simply bouncing a subordinate, the boss can send him to a firm that specializes in helping unwanted executives to find new jobs. The practitioners have even coined a euphemistic...
...consumers seldom see eye to eye on the state of business, but rarely have they been so far apart as they are today. To most economists, who judge what is happening by broad statistical indexes, the signs are increasingly clear that business is coming out of an inflationary downturn into a period of gradual but steady production growth and slower price rises. To many consumers, who reason from personal experience, the economists are talking gibberish; they expect a continued combination of recession and sharp inflation. The odd thing is that, in at least a few important respects, both are probably...
Consumers have considerable reason for their gloom. The business downturn, even if it is too mild to merit the term "recession," can still cause widespread and severe economic pain. Last week Honeywell, Lockheed-Georgia and Western Electric announced new layoffs, and several retail chains reported large declines in second-quarter profits or a loss. No less than 21% of the people polled by Harris reported that their own households had been affected by layoffs, cuts in overtime or reductions in regular work weeks; 30% told Harris that their own standard of living had dropped in the past year...
What can one call a business downturn that exhibits some but by no means all of the symptoms of a recession? Economists have long groped for an appropriate label-with painful semantic results. Paul McCracken, President Nixon's chief economic adviser, has suggested "recedence," and Former Federal Reserve Chairman William McChesney Martin once spoke of an economic "slope." Now the Manhattan-based National Bureau of Economic Research, the organization that decides which business movements merit the term recession, is joining the naming game. Ruminating about the present "episode," Vice President F. Thomas luster says: "We are thinking of labeling...