FedViews

After growing at a fairly strong pace at the end of last year, real GDP has decelerated. Some of the slowdown is probably due to temporary factors, such as a payback for unseasonably warm winter weather that may have accelerated economic activity earlier this year. However, a broad range of economic indicators for the second […]

Businesses are slowly hiring, consistent with an economy that is growing moderately. The economy has recovered about 3¾ million of the 8.8 million jobs lost during the downturn. In April, job gains were a somewhat disappointing 115,000. Still, upward revisions to jobs in February and March left the level of employment close to our expectations. […]

Following past recessions, residential construction made significant contributions to the early stages of recovery. This time, several years after the Great Recession ended, housing remains deeply depressed. Recently, in some localities, there have been pockets of improvement. However, nationally, single-family housing starts are still moving sideways. Outside housing, the recent economic news has generally been […]

Labor market conditions continued to improve in February. Payrolls increased by 227,000, with a gain of 233,000 jobs in the private sector offsetting government job losses. In addition, payroll figures for December and January were revised significantly upward. The unemployment rate remained unchanged in February at 8.3%. The labor force participation rate rose to 63.9% […]

The unemployment rate fell to 8.3% on a seasonally adjusted basis in January, down 0.6 percentage point in the past three months alone. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) incorporated updated annual population estimates in data from the survey of households, which is used to calculate the unemployment rate. However, it concluded that these […]

The number of employees on nonfarm payrolls rose by a seasonally adjusted 200,000 in December, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Private-sector payrolls gained about 212,000, while state, local, and federal government payrolls fell by about 12,000 jobs. The increase in nonfarm payrolls was somewhat higher than the average over the past several months, […]

Incoming data have generally been better than expected over the past month, suggesting that the U.S. economy continues to grow at a moderate rate. Factors that held growth back in the first part of the year, such as the supply chain disruptions that followed the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in March, have largely dissipated. However, […]

The economic recovery is proceeding at a subdued pace, with substantial and persistent resource slack and low underlying inflationary pressures. Businesses have been slowly but steadily hiring since early 2010. The economy has recovered about 2¼ million of the 8¾ million jobs lost in the recession. Private businesses have increased employment by about 2¾ million […]

Recent data have been somewhat better than expected, helping ease concerns that the economy may be stalling. Payroll employment rose by 103,000 in September. At the same time, payroll data for July and August were revised up by an average of about 50,000 jobs per month. So it now looks like the economy added roughly […]

Revisions to second-quarter GDP showed that the U.S. economy grew at a 1% rate, down from the initial estimate of 1.3% reported in July. The change was more than accounted for by downward revisions to net exports and inventories, which tend to be volatile from one quarter to the next. Some of the more stable […]