Word: slowdowns
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Riess was only 25 when he joined a prestigious group of scientists who set out in 1995 to measure what was expected would be a post-Big Bang cosmic slowdown. The idea was to compare the expansion rate today with the rate billions of years ago by gauging the speeds of exploding stars called supernovas--Riess's grad-school specialty. But in January 1998, Riess saw something weird: the number he was getting for the slowdown kept coming out negative. The universe wasn't slowing down; it was speeding up! "This seemed to imply," he says, "that some force...
...markets want to believe in the soft landing, they really do. But these are insecure times for Fed-watching investors - especially when the numbers keep sending mixed signals. Yesterday, it was soft retail sales (slowdown) and surging factory orders (rebound!). Friday the indecision got an early start with the 8:30 a.m. release of June's unemployment numbers by the Labor Department...
...present there are signs a slowdown may be under way, but the economy's overall momentum is still quite powerful. Total production of goods and services rocketed ahead at an annual rate of 5.4% in the first quarter. That was below the superheated 7.3% pace in the previous three months yet still well above what the wildest optimists would consider a sustainable pace. However, Chris Varvares, president of Macroeconomic Advisers, a consulting firm with headquarters in St. Louis, Mo., expects a "fairly abrupt" slowing in the second half of the year to below 3%, which will hold gross-domestic-product...
Fundamentals too could turn against the dollar. The doomsday fear is that the Fed, in its zeal to head off inflation, will hit the monetary brakes too hard, causing a severe slowdown in the U.S. economy. That frightens away some foreign investment, causing the dollar to drop sharply. Then inflation rises despite the slowdown, prompting the Fed to crack down harder still, and so on around a truly vicious circle...
...predicting nothing here. If the economy is really slowing and Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan stops raising interest rates, the bull market may be coming back to life. But it's way too early to conclude there is a meaningful slowdown. Greenspan will want months of data before he's convinced. We've only had weeks. And bear markets are tricky. Rallies are typical. They prove nothing. Hence my concern...