This Decade Big Zero… Next Not So Hot, Either

With the new year looming, many people are offering looks back to the previous year and/or decade, as well as ahead to what we can expect in the future. I’ve located a few you should be aware of.

From an economic standpoint, the decade which began in 2001 was a wash… we experienced almost no economic growth at all. In many ways, we’re back to where we were 10 years ago.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/opinion/28krugman.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

It was a decade with basically zero job creation. O.K., the headline employment number for December 2009 will be slightly higher than that for December 1999, but only slightly. And private-sector employment has actually declined — the first decade on record in which that happened.

It was a decade with zero economic gains for the typical family. Actually, even at the height of the alleged “Bush boom,” in 2007, median household income adjusted for inflation was lower than it had been in 1999. And you know what happened next.

It was a decade of zero gains for homeowners, even if they bought early: right now housing prices, adjusted for inflation, are roughly back to where they were at the beginning of the decade. And for those who bought in the decade’s middle years — when all the serious people ridiculed warnings that housing prices made no sense, that we were in the middle of a gigantic bubble — well, I feel your pain. Almost a quarter of all mortgages in America, and 45 percent of mortgages in Florida, are underwater, with owners owing more than their houses are worth.

Last and least for most Americans — but a big deal for retirement accounts, not to mention the talking heads on financial TV — it was a decade of zero gains for stocks, even without taking inflation into account. Remember the excitement when the Dow first topped 10,000, and best-selling books like “Dow 36,000” predicted that the good times would just keep rolling? Well, that was back in 1999. Last week the market closed at 10,520.

And forecasts for the coming year don’t look so great, either. We’re looking at possibly a decade of high unemployment.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34601256/ns/business-us_business

At best, it could take until the middle of the decade for the nation to generate enough jobs to drive down the unemployment rate to a normal 5 or 6 percent and keep it there. At worst, that won't happen until much later — perhaps not until the next decade.

In the near future, there is a decent chance that we’ll see more economic troubles in the latter half of next year.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/12/krugman-reasonably-high-chance-the-economy-will-contract.html

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman said he thinks there’s a “reasonably high chance” the economy will contract in the second half of next year.

On the "This Week" Roundtable, Krugman said he agreed with the assessment of fellow Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz that there is a significant chance the economy will shrink in 2010.

In terms of the economy and unemployment, we’ve been weathering a storm that is not yet over, and whose effects we will be feeling for quite some time to come.