Word: midyears
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Monthly rises in the Consumer Price Index flattened out and, though interest rates broke sharply at about midyear and kept falling, the contracting economy proved staggeringly painful for businesses and individuals alike. At 10.8% of the labor force, unemployment reached the highest level since 1941, and business failures surged to more than 24,000, higher than in any year since 1932. Nowhere in the country was the misery of economic downturn more acute than in the factory towns of the nation's industrial heartland. As consumers lost confidence in promises of economic recovery, household spending stalled out, shaking...
WEST GERMANY. After a decline in growth this year, expected to be around 2.5%, the West Germans can look forward to a modest 2% growth in G.N.P. in 1983, beginning in midyear, according to Herbert Giersch, director of the University of Kiel's Institute for World Economics. Inflation, now running at 4.5%, will fall to 3% by next December if wage increases are limited, as the government seeks, to 3.5% during 1983. That will be tough, said Giersch, since militant trade unions are already demanding salary hikes of about 7.5%. The government's recent efforts to stimulate...
...President abruptly breaking an agreement with Congress and chasing the wispy dream of a constitutional amendment that would magically balance future budgets. Democrats in the House playing irresponsible politics and offering no alternative proposals. New and credible forecasts of astounding federal deficits. A midyear Administration economic report too rosy to be taken seriously on Wall Street...
Moreover, Weidenbaum had trouble reconciling the optimistic projections of Administration supply-siders with his own traditional conservative views of the economy. He has already distanced himself, for example, from the Administrations midyear budget review, which will be published this week. It predicts that the economy with grow at an annual rate of more than 4.5% during the second half of 1982, and another 4.5% next year. Said Weidenbaum: "That projection is within the realm of possibility. But my personal forecast would be more on the cautious side...
...course, in the pay-any-price world of escalating health-care costs, even the most careful of HMO budget projections can quite unexpectedly boomerang. Last year, for example, the total operating budget for the Boston-based Harvard Community Health Plan was $65 million. But an unanticipated midyear spurt in hospital admissions, combined with higher than expected rate increases for services by the hospitals, wound up producing a cost overrun of $4.9 million for the plan. The Harvard HMO was forced to boost its premium 18% over last year's level. About a half-dozen other HMOs around the country...