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“Confidence is going after Moby Dick in a rowboat and taking the tartar sauce with you.”

– Zig Ziglar, American author, salesperson and motivational speaker

Signs of Economic Life

Fresh signs suggest that factories are coming back to life, home sales are picking up and consumers are feeling a slight rise in confidence.

Orders for manufactured goods did better than expected in February, rising 1.8 percent, according to the Commerce Department; this breaks the six-month trend of declines. Pending home sales and construction spending both fared better than expected, and there are signs that home price declines have ended.

“There is now some solid evidence that the period of economic free-fall is behind us, that the next step will be a slower rate of decline,” said the chief U.S. economist for IHS Global Insight. Nigel Gault predicted the economy would bottom out in the second half of the year. Another economist said the economy may begin recovering in as few as four months, but many economists believe the recession won’t end until much later this year and possibly not until 2010.

The job market remains weak, with the unemployment rate hovering around 8.5 percent. Still, U.S. consumers are feeling more hopeful. According to a New York Times/CBS News poll, 20 percent of Americans now think the economy is getting better, compared to just 7 percent who believed so in mid-January before Obama took office. At that same time, only 15 percent said they believed the country was headed in the right direction, compared to 39 percent today.


Source: Roemer Report. Used with permission.

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