Word: economists
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...problem is twofold. First, it's hard to predict the future. Second, it's really hard to predict the future when so many parts of the economy are in flux. "This has been an extraordinarily difficult period for forecasters," says Harvard economist James Stock. "Our models aren't really designed for predicting massive changes." Philip Joyce, a professor of public policy and administration at George Washington University, figures that in normal times, budget projections a couple of years out tend to be pretty reliable, at five years less so and at 10 years not much at all. "But these aren...
...Surveys show that, despite concerns, most small businesses say that the access to credit has not been a problem for them in the financial crisis," says economist Edward Yardeni. "Now it will...
...anyway, that policy is paying off. China announced today that its GDP in the second quarter grew at 7.9%, just a shade below the 8.1% goal the government set for growth in 2009. "The strong acceleration in underlying economic activity is now unmistakable," says Yu Song, a Goldman Sachs economist based in Hong Kong...
...advisers who wrote the paper, Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, went on to land key jobs in the Obama Administration. Romer is the head of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, and Bernstein is the chief economist and economic-policy adviser to Vice President Joe Biden. And the stimulus bill that both economists championed became law in mid-February. What has not come to pass, however, is the boom in job creation that Romer and Bernstein predicted. A little over a month ago, the Administration said the stimulus bill had created or saved 150,000 jobs. That...
Vincent Reinhart, a fellow at the right-leaning think tank the American Enterprise Institute and a former top economist at the Federal Reserve, says the problem with the stimulus bill is that it stimulates parts of the economy - like the health-care and alternative-energy industries - that were likely to grow anyway. He believes it would have been better to spend on U.S. manufacturing, where demand is much less certain to resurface and jobs are being shed rapidly. "I don't buy the argument that you just have to give the stimulus package more time," says Reinhart. "By the test...