Word: slump
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While the U.S. housing industry suffers through its worst slump in 15 years, Dallas-based Fox & Jacobs has sold some 600 cottage homes in Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston since July. Reason: the houses are going for as little as $34,500. Fox & Jacobs, which uses assembly-line methods, has become a master builder of low-priced homes...
...slump, however, is spreading far beyond autos and housing. Retailers suffered a sharp 1.5% drop in sales last month; many are anticipating lackluster business in their all-important Christmas season. The electronics firms of northern California's "Silicon Valley," which make microchip components for computers, have for years been riding a heady boom, but now their profits are plummeting. Employment and spending by state and local governments kept a sturdy prop under the national economy during many previous recessions, but now they too are falling, in part because Reagan's budget cuts have reduced the flow of federal...
...prevailing view on how deep the recession may go is voiced by Allen Sinai, senior economist of Data Resources, Inc., a Lexington, Mass., forecasting firm. He predicts a drop of 2% to 3% in total national output, which would mean only a middling slump, "worse than some of the postwar recessions, but not as bad as others." Sinai, however, has some doubt about his forecast. The current downturn, he notes, began less than a year after the short but sharp recession of mid-1980. "A lot of corporations and financial institutions are in weak condition" because they never fully recovered...
...principal responsibility for these pains and risks on Reagan. Most economists view the recession as primarily the result of the tight-money policy adopted by Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, before Reagan took office-though they note Reagan has supported that policy. Some also see the slump as a delayed effect of the vacillating economic strategy of Reagan's predecessor. "I call it a Reagan-Volcker-Carter recession," says Economist Walter Heller, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the 1960s...
Businessmen hasten to point out that rates still have not come down anywhere near enough to promise a quick end to the recession. Generally, corporate chiefs view a continued slump as the bitter but unavoidable cost of defeating inflation...