Word: growths
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Should that happen, the TIME board's numerical forecasts are not spectacularly gloomy. Stephen Roach, chief economist of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, the giant investment firm, foresees the growth in gross domestic product slowing to an annual rate of 3.2% by the end of this year--vs. 3.9% for all 1997--and then to 2.5% by the end of 1999. Sinai expects 1.5% for all 1998, then...
...Roach guesses 5% a year from now, and Sinai 5.3% by mid-1999.) Those estimates are all significantly higher than August's 4.5%, not to mention the 28-year low of 4.3% touched last April and May. It would be anything but bad, however, for a period of "growth recession." Even a 5.5% jobless rate would be lower than any the U.S. achieved between August 1990 and November...
...slowdown, or growth recession or whatever, will bite much harder into corporate profits. They are already dwindling, to the grief of investors who saw the Dow Jones industrial average plunge from a July 17 high of 9337 to an Aug. 31 low of 7539, at least partly because it became obvious that earlier expectations of a continued smart rise in profits were wrong. Wyss expects after-tax profits to drop about 2% this year and stay essentially flat in 1999, perhaps rising a nearly invisible...
...Gordon, who occupies the prestigious Stanley G. Harris chair of economics at Northwestern University, thinks profits may be hit even harder, though he offers no numbers. His explanation: labor shortages caused by the past boom are still severe and likely to remain so even with a slowdown in the growth of output. That condition will push up wages faster than companies will be able to raise either prices or productivity--that is, output per hour. Productivity is in fact already sliding, as it usually does at this late stage of a business expansion, the increasing computerization of the economy notwithstanding...
...board members' numerical forecasts, however, is the marked change in the overall tone of some of their comments. Sinai, usually a sturdy optimist, now sees "the greatest risk to good times since 1989-91," the period that included the last outright recession, and though he predicts only a growth recession, he immediately adds that "I can't guarantee there will not be a recession in a traditional sense...