Word: hardness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Undertone of Alarm. In most of its negotiations, Moscow is placing heavy emphasis on trade and barter. The reason is plain: the whole East Bloc is suffering from a severe shortage of consumer goods as well as hard currency to buy them. West Germany, on the other hand, has become Europe's strongest nation economically. What is not so clear is why the Soviet Union and its satellites are pressing so urgently for negotiations on other issue-most notably an overall European security treaty and other agreements that renounce the use of force. One reason may be that Moscow...
...supply; since midyear, it has permitted no growth at all. Ironically, Friedman's principal complaint is that the Federal Reserve is overdoing the restraints in its effort to cure inflation. "If the board continues to keep the growth of money at zero for another two months, I find it hard to see how we can avoid a severe recession," he says. "The board has made the same mistake that it has made all along. It is going too far in the right direction...
...other side of the coin is that if Nixon pushes anti-inflationary policies too long or too hard, the result could indeed be what most economists define as a recession: at least two successive three-month periods of no real growth in the total economy, a condition that is almost sure to bring about a substantial jump in unemployment. At present, the nation might find such an experience particularly troublesome. A recession could aggravate social unrest. The jobless rates among blacks normally run twice as high as those common whites; among blacks under 25 years old, they often reach five...
...spring, and more recently by warnings of a forthcoming economic decline. The worst depressant in the market undoubtedly has been tight money. The market frequently falls before recessions and rises when they occur; thus a 1970 recession would not necessarily make stock prices fall further. But it will be hard for stocks to rally briskly until credit is eased. Economists generally expect that interest rates will taper off slightly?perhaps by 1% or a bit more?as production and demand slacken in the year ahead, but that they will stay fairly close to their historic highs for as far ahead...
ECONOMICS is the perilous profession, whose leading practitioners put their forecasts on the record in hard numbers almost every year. Members of TIME's Board of Economists, who met this month with the editorial staff in Manhattan and supplied much of the material for the accompanying cover story, made the following first predictions...