Filed under: Forecasts, Bad news, Economic data, Housing, Recession

Reuters reports that one of the U.S.’s leading economists, Harvard’s Martin Feldstein gave a speech in Florida today in which he said that the U.S. faces a recession that could be “significantly more severe” than recent ones.

This is very bad news because Feldstein is the head of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) which is responsible for determining when recessions begin and end. Not only that, but he is a Republican whose editorials are frequently in the Wall Street Journal. So for Feldstein to make this claim, he must have very compelling and irrefutable evidence on which to base his prediction. Given his position in the firmament of economists, It would be incredibly irresponsible for him to be exaggerating for effect.

Here are some of the scare quotes:

• “The situation is very bad, the situation is getting worse, and the risks are that it could get very bad.”
• “There’s no doubt that this year and next year are going to be very difficult years.”

Continue reading Leading U.S. economist: “The situation is very bad and getting worse”

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Share This

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 at 2:47 am and is filed under Stocks Money News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.