Word: steepest
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...snowstorm? Or a more serious drop in consumer confidence? It isn't surprising that different people wanted to spin the decline in March retail sales in different ways; what was curious was who picked which way. Republicans, who might normally ascribe the 1% decline, the steepest in two years, to Clintonite economic malaise, swore it was a temporary glitch in a continuing recovery, caused by the March blizzard that kept East Coast consumers from shopping. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, who would be expected to agree with the anomalous act-of-God explanation, instead declared gravely that "recovery is at risk...
...believed that the U.S. economy had finally climbed out of the doldrums, the news from the nation's shopping malls last week came as a slap in the face. The Commerce Department reported that Americans shut their wallets in March and sent retail sales down 1% for the steepest monthly decline in more than two years. While part of that drop reflected the severe March weather, Commerce revised its earlier optimistic figures for February, saying store sales had fallen 0.3% instead of rising 0.3%, as it had originally reported. "The momentum of the recovery is decidedly fading," says Allen Sinai...
...paradise is in trouble. "Forever, or so it seems," says sociologist Mark Baldassare, who has studied Orange County for 10 years, "this place was on the steepest of upward curves. But today, with every index down, the people who thought they were immune to recessions, the Republican white collar workers, have been caught. Bush will likely carry the county again, but if he doesn't get a 300,000-vote plurality here, there's no way he'll take California." And that, says Representative Robert Dornan, one of the county's five Congressmen, "is iffy at best, unless there...
...respond to economic setbacks with massive layoffs. But not everyone escapes. Foreign workers holding jobs in the construction and service industries are being laid off in large numbers. Many companies are also shedding part-time workers, mostly women. In January overtime hours in major companies dropped 17.8%, the steepest decline since 1975. While the official unemployment rate still hovers just above the 2% mark, it is likely to move beyond...
...dropped immediately from around 4 births per woman to the "replacement level" of 2 (a baby to replace each parent), the population would still climb to more than 8 billion sometime in the middle of the next century. That is because the vast numbers of females born on the steepest part of the S curve in the '50s and '60s have generated "demographic momentum," a boom in childbearing that will last for some time to come...