2008 U.S. Economic Outlook

[Luke_Wilbur]

Underlying CBO’s baseline projections is a forecast that U.S. economic growth will slow in calendar year 2008 but pick up in 2009. Specifically, CBO anticipates that GDP will grow by 1.7 percent in real terms for 2008 as a whole, about half a percentage point less than the growth recorded last year. For 2009, CBO forecasts that GDP growth will rebound to 2.8 percent

 

Problems in the housing and financial markets, along with high oil prices, triggered much of the recent slowdown. Between mid-2006 and the end of 2007, residential investment (which includes the construction of new housing units, improvements to existing units, and brokers’ commissions) declined, but the drop was largely offset by growth in both consumer spending and business fixed investment (businesses’ spending on structures, equipment, and software). Those two sectors are unlikely to provide as much support to economic growth this year. Residential investment is expected to continue to decline through much of 2008; in addition, the growth of consumer spending, sustained thus far by solid growth in people’s real income as well as by their borrowing and use of savings, is likely to fall off, curtailed by a drop in housing wealth (home equity), increased costs for borrowing, the high price of oil, and slower growth of real income. The resulting weak domestic demand for goods and services in turn is expected to slow the growth of business fixed investment, which is likely to further diminish the pace of overall economic growth this year.

 

In contrast, the relative economic strength of the United States’ major trading partners—in particular, developing countries with emerging market economies—when combined with the dollar’s decline will partially offset the sluggishness in domestic demand expected in 2008 and support U.S. economic growth by stimulating exports. Emerging economies have become increasingly less dependent on demand in the United States to fuel their expansions and, as a result, have become less vulnerable to slowdowns in U.S. economic growth. Moreover, the pace of the decline begun in 2002 in the value of the dollar relative to the currencies of major trading partners—which helps make U.S. exports less expensive—has quickened. Those developments, accompanied by less domestic demand for imports, are likely to reduce the U.S. current-account deficit (broadly, the summary measure of the United States’ trade with the rest of the world).

 

Inflation (as measured by the year-to-year change in the price index for personal consumption expenditures) is likely to be about the same this year as last year; in 2009, CBO forecasts, the rate will fall, to 1.8 percent, as inflation in energy and food prices eases. The unemployment rate, which was 4.6 percent last year, will average 5.1 percent in 2008 and reach 5.3 percent by the end of the year, CBO estimates. Interest rates on Treasury securities are expected to remain low this year and to increase in 2009 as the economy works through and emerges from its current difficulties. In CBO’s forecast, the rate on 3-month Treasury bills averages 3.2 percent in 2008 and moves higher, to 4.2 percent, in 2009. Similarly, the rate on 10-year Treasury notes moves from an average of 4.2 percent in 2008 to 4.9 percent in 2009.

 

For 2010 to 2018, CBO projects that real growth will average 2.7 percent and the personal consumption expenditure price index, 1.9 percent. CBO also projects that in the latter years of the projection period, the unemployment rate will average 4.8 percent and that the interest rates on 3-month Treasury bills and 10-yearTreasury notes will average 4.7 percent and 5.2 percent, respectively

[Guest Mark]

Here is the Warren Buffett way of weathering the economy:

 

Turn off the stock market

Don’t worry about the economy

Buy a business, not a stock

Manage a portfolio of businesses