Word: worst
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...historical? The -6.2% figure represents the worst quarter for economic growth in the U.S. since 1982, when the economy shrank at a 6.4% annual rate. And the BEA - which said new data on exports, consumer spending and inventories were the main causes of the dramatic change in its estimate - isn't done revising: there will be one last estimate of fourth-quarter GDP on March 26, then what are called benchmark revisions a couple of years down the road. The revision trend is clearly downward, and the 1982 mark is likely to be overtaken...
...After that, the two worst quarters for GDP growth since the BEA began keeping track of quarterly numbers in 1947 have been -7.8%, in the second quarter of 1980, and -10.4%, in the first quarter of 1958. But those were both temporary setbacks engineered by the Federal Reserve to crack down on inflation, and growth resumed soon afterward. All indications so far this year are that the downturn has continued and possibly worsened...
...sources of economic weakness in the fourth quarter were across the board. Consumer spending dropped at a 4.3% pace, its worst performance since 1980. Nonresidential private fixed investment - a.k.a. capital spending - fell at a 21.1% rate, the worst since 1975. Exports fell at a 23.6% annual pace, the worst since 1971. And residential investment was down at a 22.2% pace, but that's the worst only since the first quarter...
...Unless it ends suddenly tomorrow, all signs are that this will stack up as the worst economic downturn in the U.S. since the Great Depression. But if government spending is able to begin stabilizing the economy sometime in the second half of this year, the scale of the decline in indicators ranging from GDP to employment to consumer spending will be much closer to that of the harsh recessions of 1981-82 and 1974-75 than the nearly complete economic collapse of the 1930s. Will the stimulus work? That's the $770 billion question the new GDP numbers really...
...worst can happen. It usually doesn't, but in large part that's because we have taken seriously these past disasters and tried to learn from them. I sometimes think we're victims of our own success. We have been able to mitigate the adverse affects of volcanoes through science. There have been no crashes of aircraft because we've gotten pretty good at diverting them. The hazard is what it's always been. Our ability to deal with it has improved...