Forecasting in economics has never been easy, but now it seems the signals are increasingly hazy. Either that, or it's time to admit they are clear, and the picture is not pleasant.
Growth in America faded in the fourth quarter, according to the latest GDP statistics from the government, to an annual rate of 2.4 percent, down from an earlier estimate of 3.2 percent. In the third quarter, growth was 4.1 percent.
There are the numbers: 4.1 percent, 3.2 percent, 2.4 percent. A clear slowdown.
Earlier, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the U.S. labor market has recovered slowly and only partially since the end of the Great Recession, which ran from December 2007 to June 2009.
"More than four and a half years after the end of the recession, employment has risen sluggishly -- much more slowly that it grew, on average, during the four previous recoveries that lasted more than one year," the CBO said.
And at the same time, the CBO noted, the unemployment rate has fallen "only partway back to its precession level." Part of that improvement, moreover, is because "an unusually large number of people have stopped looking for work," the CBO added, and the rate of long-term unemployment -- the percentage of the work force out of a job for more than six months -- "remains extraordinarily high."
The nation is about 6 million jobs short of where it would be if the unemployment rate had returned to its pre-recession level, the CBO said.
Mark Twain once pointed that "Figures don't lie, but liars do figure." Perhaps the defenders of austerity and the embattled 1 percent can figure out that their war of opposition is a losing battle.
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