Recession

Baltimore's economic performance over the last year ranks it 179th among the 300 largest metropolitan economies worldwide, according to a new report that describes the region as "partially recovered" from the last recession. The Brookings Institution's Global MetroMonitor study, to be released today, looked at growth in employment and gross domestic product in metro areas internationally. Only two of the country's large metro areas cracked the top 50 - Houston and San Jose - and just three (Dallas, Knoxville and Pittsburgh)

The U.S. economy is on life support, and all the enacted or proposed treatments, while necessary, are at best short term or palliative. The time has come to build a stronger foundation for our future well-being. Here's the quandary: The markets are being downgraded due to loss of job creation, but how can we suddenly employ tens of millions of workers when there are no new industries created to employ them since the recession a mere three years ago? The current mass-employment industries - transportation, construction, technology, traditional energy and health - are either passé or already have enough workers to do the job, unless we create stimulus-related public works jobs, as President Barack Obama has proposed, that may or may not produce sustained employment.

Personal income in Maryland has collectively risen back out of the hole the recession dug. Maryland is one of only two states where personal income — not including government payments such as unemployment benefits and Social Security — is higher than when the economy faltered, according to a Commerce Department analysis released Monday. The agency tallied up wages, dividends and other income earned this spring. The other state is Alaska. Maryland residents would take in $243 billion on an annual basis at the pace set in the second quarter, minus those government payments, the federal agency reported.

WASHINGTON -- In the fall of 1981, 20 top corporate economists issued an economic forecast to the Business Council, composed of top corporate executives, predicting that there would be no recession.In fact, a recession had begun the previous July that was to last until November 1982 and cause the unemployment rate to reach 10.8 percent, the highest since the Great Depression.The council's mistaken forecast underlies the difficulties of pinpointing in what month a recession begins and ends.

THERE IS bad news and good news on the global economic front. The good news is more important than the bad news.The most publicized economic news concerns recession coming America, and perhaps recession coming everywhere. The roots of the gloom: soaring oil prices due to the Gulf crisis, a sluggish economy, plummeting stock prices and real-estate values, higher inflation and unemployment, bad banks and bad loans.Experts say we may or may not already be in a recession; if we are not, we may or may not be in one soon; such a recession may or may not be mild, may or may not be long, and we may or may not know the remedy.

THE DUBIOUS honor of officially declaring the economy in recession used to belong to the National Bureau of Economic Research, a venerable, official-sounding private institute based in Cambridge, Mass. NBER's arbitrary definition two consecutive quarters of decline in economic output had the virtue of being precise and intuitively approriate.By that test, we are not quite in recession yet. But last Tuesday, the upstart National Association of Business Economists jumped the gun and declared a recession on the basis of a far softer, but more contemporary, indicator a poll!

President Bush's chief economic adviser, Michael Boskin, this week confidently declared an end to the recession that he predicted would never come. But even if Boskin is technically right in applying the arcane formulas of economics, the recession is by no means over for the 8.7 million Americans without jobs.Less than half that army of unemployed, however, is receiving unemployment benefits. The reason: Either they never qualified under increasingly stringent federal standards, or if they did qualify, their benefits have expired.