Word: indexes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...last heady hurrah has faded, the victor faces a tough task in getting the laggard economy back on schedule. With few exceptions, the indicators point to continuing sluggishness in the business growth needed to create jobs, sales and profits. The most disappointing disclosure: the Government's composite index of leading indicators, which had risen for 17 consecutive months as the economy climbed out of its worst recession in decades, fell .7% in September-the second monthly drop...
Government statisticians were quick to note that despite the lull, the economy is still expanding, if slowly. They note that the index was undoubtedly distorted by the four-week strike against Ford Motor Co., and also that its record as a measure of future business trends is uneven. Three times since 1948 the index fell for two months in a row but no economic downturn followed. On six other occasions, however, two or more consecutive months of decline in the index did signal an overall drop in economic activity...
...eleven indicators available for the September index, the most disquieting was the layoff rate. Layoffs in the nation's factories increased from 1.3 for each 100 workers in August to 1.5 in September. The new figures tend to confute those (mainly Republican) economists who have argued up to now that the nation's high 7.8% jobless rate was almost exclusively a result of growth in the number of people looking for employment, rather than a consequence of employed workers losing their jobs. Among other leading indicators, new orders dipped and manufacturers cut the average work week...
...have shied away from the deepening mire of Beckett study. Interest in Beckett is at once so sticky a wicket to most people that they turn away from even the intrinsic pleasure of his works, and at the same time so enchantingly open to interpreters that the PMLA index mushrooms yearly with new entries under his name. The flood of criticism is growing so rapidly that Richard Seaver estimates in his introduction it will surpass in bulk by the year 2000 the secondary work on any other writer in English besides Shakespeare...
...into what can loosely be called magic realism. His new novel is a more circumscribed, grimmer and more obscure work. Its setting-mainly the presidential palace of a nameless South American country-shows a little less Faulkner and a little more Kafka. The Castle, with a high temperature-humidity index, comes to mind...