Economic Recovery

The Obama administration is engaged in a broad push to make more home loans available to people with weaker credit, an effort that officials say will help power the economic recovery but that skeptics say could open the door to the risky lending that caused the housing crash in the first place. President Obama's economic advisers and outside experts say the nation's much-celebrated housing rebound is leaving too many people behind , including young people looking to buy their first homes and...

THE FIRST QUARTER: Macy's earned $217 million, or 55 cents per share, in the quarter ended May 4, up from $181 million, or 43 cents per share, a year ago. Revenue rose 4 percent to $6.38 billion. Analysts expected earnings per share of 53 cents on revenue of $6.4 billion. BEHIND THE QUARTER: Macy, a standout among its peers throughout the economic recovery, has benefited from its move to tailor merchandise to local markets. It says cool temperatures and economic worries dampened shoppers' spending in...

ATHENS, Greece — Greece's recession-wracked economy should start recovering next year and its sky-high unemployment rate should edge lower from the end of 2014, the finance minister said in an interview broadcast Thursday. Speaking on state-run NET television, Yannis Stournaras said Greece could be in a position to return to the international bond markets at the end of 2014. Greece has been relying on billions of euros in international rescue loans since May 2010 after excessive debt and a...

Overshadowing the nation's economic recovery is not only the number of Americans who have lost their jobs, but also those who have stopped looking for new ones. These workers are not counted in the Labor Department 's monthly unemployment rate , yet they say they are willing to work. Since the recession began, their numbers have grown by 30 percent, to more than 6.4 million, amounting to a hidden labor force that could stymie the turnaround. Adding these workers to February's jobless rate pushes it up to...

It's time to admit something: The economy is not recovering. It is, if anything, unrecovering. We've added an average of 119,000 jobs a month since January. That's better than the 78,000 new jobs the economy averaged per month in 2010. But it's barely enough to keep up with population growth. It's not nearly enough to cut into the unemployment rate . And over the past three months, it has fallen to 96,000 per month. According to Macroeconomic Advisers, growth for the rest of the year is tracking at...

Maybe we Americans can learn from Latvia. Yes, Latvia. To the geographically challenged, Latvia is a small country ( population: 2.2 million ) bordering the Baltic Sea with two other tiny neighbors, Estonia and Lithuania. More relevant for our purposes, Latvia has just come through a horrendous economic crisis far worse than anything Americans have yet endured. Unemployment reached 20.5 percent in early 2010 ; Latvia's gross domestic product — its output — dropped 25 percent from its peak.

The past few months have reminded Americans that progress can mean two steps forward and one step back. The death of Osama bin Laden has lifted President Obama's approval ratings — temporarily — but also increased fears of a retaliatory attack on U.S. soil. Economic recoveries abroad are bringing job growth — and higher oil prices. In the eighth "How We're Doing" Index , scholars at the Brookings Institution looked at the past five quarters and found an uneven economic recovery that is much...

Why is this recovery different from all other recoveries? Many of the reasons are widely known: Rebounding from a financial crisis takes an excruciatingly long time; the huge decline in housing values has reduced Americans' purchasing power; large corporations are making do with fewer employees — at least, in this country. But what really sets the current recovery apart from all its predecessors is this: Almost three years after economic growth resumed, the real...

The nation's home prices have fallen to their lowest level since 2002, according to a private report, casting a troubling shadow over what has otherwise been a brightening economic recovery. Although analysts have been nervously eyeing rising oil prices and Europe's struggling economy, Tuesday's S&P/Case-Shiller index of property values report offered a sobering reminder that the still-shaky housing market remains one of the most potent threats to a robust recovery. In December,...

WASHINGTON — The nation's slowly improving jobs picture hides problems like stagnant wages and fewer working hours that strike directly at President Barack Obama's base of support — young people, racial minorities and the less affluent. As the president launches a new focus on jobs, his traditional allies contend Obama has put too much of an emphasis on a deficit-cutting grand bargain with Republicans at the expense of creating jobs. New college graduates face a downbeat labor market.

WASHINGTON — The American economy and job market are moving in the right direction, just not very quickly. The news Friday that U.S. employers added a solid 165,000 jobs in April and unemployment fell to a four-year low of 7.5 percent came as a relief. The Dow Jones industrial average surged 142 points, or 1 percent, on the news to close at a record 14,973. The better-than-expected April numbers erased worries that the U.S. economy was stalling for the fourth year...

For the third year in a row, the nation's economic recovery seems to be petering out just as temperatures start to go up. Hiring has dropped off. Shoppers are putting away their wallets. Government spending cuts are looming. That has fueled predictions of an abrupt slowdown over the next few months. Economists are forecasting tepid growth of just over 1 percent during the second quarter of the year. The economy was expanding at roughly twice that pace over the winter. In fact, although the drivers have been different, the...

The U.S. economy, White House economists believe, is finally on the mend, and for real this time. But bad fiscal policy out of Washington — read premature deficit reduction — could still mess it all up. That is the overarching conclusion to be drawn from the latest Economic Report of the President, a thick report issued Friday by the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) that gives a rundown on what the president's in-house economics team thinks about the forces shaping the...

Although steady job growth in the construction sector has recently spurred optimism about the strength of the nation's economic recovery, economists and local construction executives say the industry is poised to make only modest contributions to the growth of the Washington region's labor market this year. These forecasts reflect the unique composition of the Washington area economy: Its housing market has room for improvement, but not as much as in other parts of the country where it...

Don't be fooled by economists' predictions of slower economic growth during the fourth quarter. The forecasts mask what many believe is a pretty solid recovery. The government will release its first estimate of the nation's gross domestic product Wednesday morning, and the consensus prediction is for a paltry growth rate of 1.1 percent. Some are expecting growth to slow to as little as 0.4 percent — barely above stall speed. But dig a little deeper, and the picture is not so grim.

Robert S. McElvaine told us repeatedly that insufficient government spending prolonged the Great Depression [" Cutting our way back to the Depression ," Outlook, July 10]. The author is worried that cuts today will cause another depression, but he does not identify a single reason why restraint might hurt the economy. By contrast, it is easy to identify government actions that made the Great Depression worse. Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law tax increases that punished workers and...

Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) said Thursday that Maryland should not consider tax increases or other drastic measures to correct a long-term budget imbalance until the state reaches "a point of economic recovery" -- a condition that economic analysts say won't be reached until at least 2012. The comments marked O'Malley's most direct response yet to an election-year attack accelerated this week by Republicans after he released his budget proposal. Critics have said that the final spending plan of O'Malley's term,...

The nation's housing market is surging again after years of historic declines, and the unique forces powering its return could last well into 2013. The number of homes for sale is at its lowest level since before the recession, sparking competition among buyers that has led to 10 straight months of price increases. The volume of activity is the highest since 2007. Builders broke ground in December on the most new housing developments in four years . And interest rates on mortgages are expected to remain...

As Washington debates whether to raise the limit on government borrowing, an earlier conflict over the debt ceiling offers a cautionary tale about how brinksmanship can damage the economy. The U.S. economic recovery was chugging along in the summer of 2011 when a partisan fight broke out over whether Congress would raise the federal debt limit and avoid a national default. The protracted, unsettling nature of the negotiations between the White House and Republicans...