Fed officials lowered their expectations for economic growth and warned that a return to normal unemployment levels could be years away.
What is the comfortable number that this administration has set for a normal, healthy unemployment rate in this country?
Yet, despite what may become the new normal of 10% unemployment, two-thirds still believe they can achieve it.
The 1970s consensus was that powerful economic growth and healthy stock markets were a thing of the past, and the new normal would be inflation and high unemployment.
When their benign influence fades, the inflationary pressure due to low unemployment will come though as normal.
At that point the GDP and unemployment rates should be back in their normal ranges and increased growth should occur for some time.
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With persistently high unemployment, current circumstances are anything but normal.
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These are hardly excessive growth rates in normal times, much less in an economy with almost 10 percent unemployment, with capacity utilization down from the 80s to the 60s, and with nonbank credit sinking, productivity growing rapidly, and with unit labor cost declining.
"Higher unemployment, declining incomes and crushing debt is not a new normal, " Mr. Ryan said.
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' Higher unemployment, declining incomes and crushing debt is not a new normal.
While core inflation, which strips out food and energy, was a more normal 1.8%, that is probably headed lower as high unemployment and unused capacity put downward pressure on wages and prices.
We all hope that the economy picks up, the unemployment rate falls, and that economic growth returns to a more normal pace.
The rate of short-term unemployment six months or less is almost back to normal.
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While presidents usually like to use these speeches to make Americans feel good about where they are, President Obama might think about speaking straight to a nation frustrated with a new normal of stagnant growth, where politicians talk about economic improvement even as the workforce continually struggles with high rates of unemployment and economic insecurity.
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