SF FedViews

Eric T. Swanson, senior research advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, states his views on the current economy and the outlook.

Recent data have been uneven but on balance consistent with a continued moderate recovery of overall economic activity and the labor market, with modest price inflation. We expect that the pace of gross domestic product (GDP) growth will pick up over the next few years and that the unemployment rate will decline only gradually. Hence, a large degree of labor market slack is likely to persist at least through 2015. The initial estimate of real GDP growth in the third quarter of 2012 was revised upwards in November from a modest 2.0% pace to a more solid 2.7%. However, an upward […]

Bharat Trehan, research advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, states his views on the current economy and the outlook.

Sylvain Leduc, research advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, states his views on the current economy and the outlook.

Simon Kwan, vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, states his views on the current economy and the outlook.

Reuven Glick, group vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, states his views on the current economy and the outlook.

After growing at a fairly strong pace at the end of last year, real GDP has decelerated. Some of the slowdown is probably due to temporary factors, such as a payback for unseasonably warm winter weather that may have accelerated economic activity earlier this year. However, a broad range of economic indicators for the second quarter, including payroll job growth, personal income, and manufacturing orders, have come in softer than we expected. Recent data suggest that the recovery has less momentum than we anticipated. This evidence, coupled with increasing strains in global financial markets, has led us to mark down our […]

Businesses are slowly hiring, consistent with an economy that is growing moderately. The economy has recovered about 3¾ million of the 8.8 million jobs lost during the downturn. In April, job gains were a somewhat disappointing 115,000. Still, upward revisions to jobs in February and March left the level of employment close to our expectations. The weaker apparent employment momentum may reflect warm winter weather in many parts of the country, which could have pulled some hiring forward. The unemployment rate was 8.1% in April. We expect the rate to remain near 8% at the end of this year and to […]

Following past recessions, residential construction made significant contributions to the early stages of recovery. This time, several years after the Great Recession ended, housing remains deeply depressed. Recently, in some localities, there have been pockets of improvement. However, nationally, single-family housing starts are still moving sideways. Outside housing, the recent economic news has generally been a bit better than expected. An improving labor market is a crucial underpinning for our projection of moderate real GDP growth of around 2½% to 2¾% this year. The pace of net job growth has picked up over the past six months. We have recovered more […]

Labor market conditions continued to improve in February. Payrolls increased by 227,000, with a gain of 233,000 jobs in the private sector offsetting government job losses. In addition, payroll figures for December and January were revised significantly upward. The unemployment rate remained unchanged in February at 8.3%. The labor force participation rate rose to 63.9% from 63.7%. The payroll increase was slightly better than expectations. Analysts were already anticipating continued improvement in the labor market following an earlier ADP National Employment Report showing solid private-sector job growth in February. We expect continued slow improvement in the labor market for the remainder […]