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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Rat dog micro-cap picks... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bucky Katt who wrote (12952)	7/17/2003 2:21:20 PM
From: Bucky Katt	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 48463

And this sure makes me feel better, with a big laugh> (You can't make stuff like this up) Academics Say Recession Ended in November 2001 (I wonder what kind of crack these "experts" are smoking?) By JON HILSENRATH and MICHAEL S. DERBY Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL WASHINGTON -- To many executives the economy only now seems to be gaining its footing. And to many workers, a recovery still seems far off. But the National Bureau of Economic Research declared the recession that began in March 2001 ended a long time ago. In November 2001 to be exact. The decision to declare a recovery concludes months of debate within the NBER about how to reconcile the fact that the nation's economic output -- as measured by gross domestic product -- has been expanding consistently since late 2001 while employment has continued to decline. The economists on the NBER committee who declared the recession over essentially decided that GDP should be more prominent in their thinking. "In determining that a trough occurred in November 2001, the committee did not conclude that economic conditions since that month have been favorable or that the economy has returned to operating at normal capacity," the NBER said in a release. "Rather, the committee determined only that the recession ended and a recovery began that month." The Federal Reserve's latest outlook for the economy, provided earlier this week, sees real GDP growth for the current year ranging between 2.25% and 2.75%, accelerating to between 3.75% and 4.75% in 2004. Among economic data released Thursday, the Labor Department said the number of workers filing first-time applications for unemployment benefits fell to a three-week low last week. Initial jobless claims fell by 29,000 to 412,000 in the week that ended July 12, the lowest level since the week of June 21. The four-week average, which smooths out weekly fluctuations, declined by 3,500 to 424,000. Home-building activity increased again in June, with housing starts rising by a larger-than-expected 3.7% to a seasonally adjusted 1.803 million annual rate, the Commerce Department said. Manufacturing activity in the mid-Atlantic region showed further signs of improvement in July, as the Philadelphia Federal Reserve reported its regional index of factory business conditions shot up to 8.3 from 4.0 in June. The criteria used by the NBER for dating recessions differ from the common market shorthand, which defines a recession as two consecutive quarters of contraction in gross domestic product. The group, which has served as the official scorekeeper of economic activity for decades, instead looks at changes in employment, real income, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales that are "normally visible in real GDP." It seeks to determine peaks and troughs in activity in these sectors as the key determining factors of whether the economy is in an expansionary or recessionary phase. "The behavior of these series strongly suggests that the trough occurred in late 2001," the NBER noted. The NBER's call on the 2001 recession means that a renewed downturn would represent a fresh recession, rather than the much-talked about double dip. The group acknowledged that one its main barometers, employment, has remained problematic, even as real GDP "has risen substantially since November 2001." Indeed, since the end of the recession, unemployment has risen from 5.6% to 6.4% as of June 2003. "The NBER defines expansions and recession in terms of whether aggregate economic activity is rising or falling" and that is what drives the ultimate determination, the group said.