[quote]“I think we’ll see decent income growth and decent job growth,” says Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at Global Insight in Lexington, Mass. “The average household will be better off, but moderately.”
The consensus forecast calls for:
A bit more here.
But before that a comment on the above link. Even if corporate earnings are down to 7.9%, to me that’s a sign that dividends will be back in a big way, pushing up blue chippers. 8% + MO’s 4% dividend is 12%, better than the market average. NOthing to honk your nose at.
Now, for some more good news.
[quote]“[P]roductivity is the best single measure of what leads to differences in economic performance. Even though GDP per capita is the all-encompassing measure, GDP per capita is determined primarily, almost entirely, by productivity. People basically work in order to have a place to sleep and something to eat and so on and so forth. The huge differences around the world are the efficiencies with which they work – their productivity.”
– William Lewis[/quote]
[quote]Even though productivity data are reported quarterly, it is not wise to pay attention to quarterly fluctuations. Most of us who follow productivity try to look for long-term trends. For this essay, I took the average annual growth rate of productivity over five-year periods. Taking a five-year average tends to smooth out the quarterly fluctuations. Although many experts use more sophisticated methods for filtering out short-term fluctuations, all of these methods result in minimizing the impact of any one quarter’s data. If all the President wanted were a briefing on trend productivity, he could see his economic advisers once a term rather than once a day.
The table below presents annualized productivity growth for various five-year periods, starting with the period 1955-1960 (from the fourth quarter of 1955 to the fourth quarter of 1960).
Five-year average annual productivity growth, first quarter to first quarter:
Period
Average Productivity Growth
1955-1960
2.03
1960-1965
2.79
1965-1970
2.09
1970-1975
2.31
1975-1980
1.55
1980-1985
1.38
1985-1990
1.65
1990-1995
1.59
1995-2000
2.28
2000-2005
3.39
What the table says is that the economy today is in great shape. The average productivity growth rate in the last five years is the highest over the past half century.[/quote]
good link, read the entire article:
tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=122805C
jdseesthelight
Man … it’s as making a busuness plan … never works out the way you want … :raspberry:
Well yes, there are always extragenous factors which might throw things off, however overall, the guidance 1 year ahead gives some rather good clues.