Word: forecasters
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Though lots of Americans are gulping at the high cost of mortgage money, housing remains one of the brightest spots in the economy. Earlier this year, the Administration privately forecast about 1.8 million "starts" in 1978. So far, construction is not only hovering above 2 million houses and apartments a year, but it is defying the long established principle that housing is always hit hardest when interest rates climb. Says Brill: "The old rules no longer hold. Housing is no longer the first area of the economy to boom or the first to bust...
...yearly rate of 11.4% in June and 62% in July. Food prices, which had been falling earlier in the summer, picked up slightly in August, but it was mainly increases in other areas that sent the index up. The Carter Administration has finally settled on a forecast of 8% inflation for all this year, and most economists tend to agree with that pessimistic view...
...only member of the Board of Economists to predict a recession next year is Beryl Sprinkel, executive vice president of Chicago's Harris Bank, and he foresees a mild and brief one. His forecast: real G.N.P. will drop 2.4% in the third quarter next year and 3.2% in the fourth quarter, but start back up in early 1980. Alan Greenspan, formerly President Ford's chief economic adviser, also sees a recession?but not until 1980, and then so gentle that it will just about meet the technical definition: two successive quarters of declines in real G.N.P...
...board's forecast assumes some temporary increase in unemployment next year?perhaps to 6.3% or 6.4% next summer, in Eckstein's view ?from last month's relatively cheering rate of 5.9%. Also, the slowdown will do little if anything to temper inflation, which is expected to average 8% this year as measured by the Consumer Price Index. Robert Nathan, who heads an economic consulting firm in Washington, thinks the rate may come down a point or so next year, but he is the board's optimist. Sprinkel believes inflation may actually worsen a little next year; the others...
Nonetheless, there are enough uncertainties to make any forecast subject to serious error. Democrat Arthur Okun, who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Lyndon Johnson, is concerned that the Federal Reserve may yet push interest rates high enough and squeeze hard enough on the U.S. money supply to bring about a recession. In the absence of any effective anti-inflation program from the Carter Administration, says Okun, "the Fed really has only two buttons in front of it. One says, 'Validate 7½% inflation' [by pouring out enough money to permit prices to go on rising at that...