* The housing sector, afflicted with an excessive inventory of unsold houses and potential buyers made nervous by a weak jobs market, is not likely to recover very soon.
* The jobs market will improve only slowly, and the long-term unemployed will find it especially difficult to get work, as will poorly educated teenagers and adults.
* Even if businesses do use their spare cash to make acquisitions — it should come as no surprise if the pace of such deals accelerates — that won’t do much to create jobs, and might actually lead to cost-cutting layoffs.
* Small businesses are more rather than less likely to remain on the sidelines, waiting to see the cost implications of healthcare “reform” and, if passed, an energy bill, and to find out just what the tax-raisers have in mind for them.
But not all of the things that are more rather than less certain are on the gloomy side of the ledger.
* Corporate earnings are surprisingly robust.
* Another meltdown of the financial sector is not in the cards.
* Growth in Asia and Latin America is likely although not certain: much depends on whether China’s economy slows, as some are predicting.
* The jobs market is more — rather than less — likely to improve, albeit slowly.
* Inflation remains tame, permitting the Fed to keep interest rates low for what Bernanke calls “an extended period”.
Most important of all, as The Economist puts it so well: “America still towers over rivals in scientific virtuosity, military power, the vitality of democracy and much else.” That is what will matter in the long run.
www.huntersnet.co.uk
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