Spain has become the latest European country to slip into recession joining the Belgium, Cyprus, The Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, Italy, The Netherlands, Ireland, Portugal, Slovenia and the United Kingdom.
Click here to view an interactive map.
*Updated to include Romania and Bulgaria
Jonathan Spicer and Van Tsui contributed to this post.
This week, for the second time ever, the U.S. Federal Reserve published policymakers’ forecasts for when the central bank should start raising rates. The chart suggested a split Fed, with three policymakers expecting a rate rise this year, three next year, seven in 2014 and four in 2015. That’s useful information, as far as it goes.
But as much as the Fed has embraced transparency in recent years, it stopped short of saying which policymaker backs a rate hike in which year – a key bit of data for grasping where the voters on Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s policy-setting committee stand, and how their positions shift over time.
Below is the bar graph that the Fed published Wednesday, with Reuters’ best estimates of who fell where. We stand ready be convinced otherwise by readers offering evidence or insight that supports a different view. Send us an email, gives us a call, write a comment or shout us out on Twitter.
Jessica Wohl and Chris Reese contributed to this post.
For every penny rise in the price of gas at the pump, U.S. customers of Walmart take a collective $1 billion hit to their disposable income.
That astounding figure, from Wal-Mart Stores Inc’s U.S. division chief merchandising officer Duncan Mac Naughton, was largely overlooked when he disclosed it at a Barclays conference earlier this week. But the statistic is highly relevant to the macroeconomic outlook, and explains why Fed officials and economists start to worry every time the price of gasoline starts to rise.
With 140 million U.S. customers a week, Walmart – the world’s biggest retailer – is the recipient of a good chunk of U.S. consumer spending, the biggest input to U.S. economic growth. Now that gas prices have stopped rising, the pressure is off. But the impact on Walmart customers may help explain a curious trend Credit Suisse economists have identified in U.S. jobless claims, which seem to go up every time gas prices rise and fall when pump prices slip.
Over the last several years, more Americans have found that aging has left them in the clutch of poverty. Between 2005 and 2009, the rate of poverty among American seniors rose as they aged, as did the number of people entering poverty, according to a new report from the nonpartisan Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI).
Poverty rates fell in the first half of the last decade for almost all age groups of older Americans (defined as age 50 or older) but increased since 2005 for every age group. Says Sudipto Banerjee, EBRI research associate and author of the report:
As people age, personal savings and pension account balances are depleted, and as people age, their medical expenditures tend to increase.
Weak U.S. economic growth in the first quarter was driven in part by a pullback in business investment — but a sharp decline in government spending also played a role. Gross domestic product grew 2.2 percent, well short of the Reuters consensus forecast of 2.5 percent. Business spending fell 2.1 percent while government expenditures saw a 3 percent drop linked to lower defense spending. Consumer spending proved a bright spot in the report, climbing 2.9 percent. Still, there is concern that this too could fade because an unusually warm winter may have brought some spending forward.
Jay Feldman at Credit Suisse breaks down the numbers:
The big downside surprise from our vantage point was in federal government spending, which contracted 5.6% in the quarter (we expected an increase given the firmer readings in monthly Treasury data). Most of the shortfall was concentrated in defense (-8.1%). Combined with the ongoing contraction in state and local government output (-1.2%), the government sector overall shaved 0.6 percentage point from top line GDP.
Yet this pales in comparison to what might happen if Congress fails to break a budget logjam by the end of this year. If left unaddressed, the resulting spending cuts and expiring tax breaks — the dreaded fiscal cliff — could easily tip the world’s largest economy back into recession.
Of all the questions Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was asked during his press conference on Wednesday, one appeared to pique his interest in particular: Was he being less aggressive as central bank chairman than the advice he dished out to Japan as an academic in the 1990s would prescribe?
It was the second half of the question asked by Binyamin Applebaum and yet the chairman was eager to get right to it: “Let me tackle that second part first,” he began.
Applebaum may have been channeling the Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman, a Princeton colleague of Bernanke’s and critic of Fed policy, who recently argued the Fed chief was being inconsistent and overly cautious.
Britain’s economy slid into its second recession since the financial crisis after official data unexpectedly showed a fall in output in the first three months of 2012:
Starting real GDP at 100 in 2003 for the UK, U.S. and euro zone shows UK GDP flat since mid-2010 and well below the 2007 peak.
Survey data had been suggesting a stronger GDP number and perhaps points to upwards revisions to come.
Weekly data on applications for unemployment benefits have gained renewed importance since a weak March payrolls number left economists wondering whether a tentative labor market recovery was about to cave again. The last two weeks’ readings were just soft enough to leave investors thinking the country’s unemployment crisis may not be healing very quickly.
Daniel Silver at JP Morgan has dug deeper into the claims figures and found a curious trend: a repeated and distinctive tendency toward upward revisions in the numbers.
There has not been a downward revision to the initial claims data reported for the prior week since the start of March 2011, and this recent streak is not a new phenomenon—there have been upward revisions in about 90% of the weekly reports since the start of 2008, as well as going back even further to the start of 2000. These revisions are relatively minor (usually adding only a few thousand claims) and do not change the broader trends in the data, but they can lead to the weekly claims reports showing decreases to the more recent levels, whereas if the prior week had been unrevised, the reports would have shown increases in claims.
The Fed appears to have moved away from the notion of additional bond purchases in recent weeks, for a mix of tactical and practical reasons including:
1. Policymakers worry about venturing any further into uncharted territory.
2. Growth isn’t weak enough to make a clear case for additional monetary easing.
3. Many officials think QE is better at thwarting deflation than boosting employment.
Just as Americans begin to regain some hope that the housing sector might be on the mend, we get another batch of data showing the sector’s not quite there yet.
Groundbreaking on homes fell unexpectedly in March to an annual rate of just 654,000, down from 694,000 in February and well short of the 705,000 Reuters consensus forecast. Some context: permits peaked above 2.2 million in early 2006, at the apex of the housing bubble. On the bright side, permits for future construction rose to their highest level in 3-1/2 years.
In other housing data this week, homebuilder sentiment deteriorated again after posting a pretty decent rebound from the very depressed levels seen in 2011.
