Word: rutenberg
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...conventional rules of timing and location should make Barry Rutenberg's profitable homebuilding business especially robust these days. His Gainesville, Florida, company is in one of the fastest-growing parts of the fast-growing Southeast, and the spring buying season is under way. Money is easy: fixed-rate mortgages have fallen to 8.2% for a 30-year loan. But fewer people are poking through his developments, and Rutenberg recently sold a home for $208,000, at a loss of $24,000. "This was the first time I had to sell a home below cost this decade," he says...
...Rutenberg is taken aback, it is because some vital sectors of the U.S. economy have slowed more sharply and swiftly than experts predicted just a few months ago. No one expected the galloping 5.1% growth in last year's fourth quarter to continue, of course, particularly since the Federal Reserve has jacked up interest rates seven times since February 1994. Most economists thought the hikes could reduce growth to a more sustainable 2% to 3% this year and thereby create a "soft landing" that would forestall inflation. But some forecasters now fear that a far more painful pullback could...