Weekly Wrap: Is our recovery stalling, again?
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Weekly Wrap: Is our recovery stalling, again?
Reviewing the week’s headlines on Wall Street and beyond with Marketplace New York bureau chief Heidi Moore and FT Alphaville’s Cardiff Garcia.
On the seemingly stalled U.S. recovery:
Heidi Moore: As things seemed to be looking better, there was an amount of caution that we all needed to have. People were worried. For instance, let’s take unemployment. Unemployment seemed to look really good for the past few months — and then it didn’t, it looked terrible. And we went up on that high and we came down low again. People had warned us: there could be problems with these numbers, it’s seasonal. We didn’t listen, and this is the suffering afterwards. But you know, nothing has really changed all that much, but it’s how we’re interpreting it.
Cardiff Garcia: She’s absolutely right that we should have been a little bit more cautious all along. It’s become incredibly frustrating to discern in real time the direction of the U.S. economy. But if there’s one lesson we’ve learned from the last two years when we’ve seen a similar pattern, is that things were never quite as bad as we thought in the worst parts of the recovery, but they were never quite as good as we thought either in the best parts. Just what we’ve had is a slow, steadily excelerating recovery, something that it’s not moving nearly as fast as we wish, but at the same time, it is getting better.
For more analysis, listen to the full audio above.
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