The United States economy continued to expand in the first quarter, but economists cautioned that the pace of growth is still not nearly fast enough to recover ground lost during the recession. National output grew at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.2 percent in the quarter, the Commerce Department reported Friday, after growth of 5.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 and 2.2 percent in the third quarter.The steady growth has quelled fears that the downturn is not quite over.“It’s been a case of, when will they stop worrying and learn to love the boom?” said Robert 最新私服
** Barbera, chief economist at ITG, who said that many economists have been too hesitant to acknowledge the steady recovery because the job market is still weak.Consumers were a major contributor to the expansion last quarter. Consumer spending grew at an annual rate of 3.6 percent in the first part of the year, after growing at an annual rate of 1.6 percent in the previous three months.The previous quarter’s growth, on the other hand, had been primarily a result of a slower drawing down of companies’ inventories — that is, businesses were not running down their stockroom shelves as quickly as they had been.Consumers account for more than 70 percent of the total economy, and they usually drive growth during economic recoveries. Their lackluster spending last year had worried experts about how sustainable a recovery driven primarily by changes in stockroom shelves could be.Economists are hopeful that families will continue to pick up the pace of purchasing, although consumers may be hesitant to open their wallets too much further given the tepid growth in job creation and personal income. Hiring only recently began to turn around, with the economy adding 162,000 jobs on net in March — 48,000 of which were temporary Census-related positions — after having destroyed about eight million jobs since the recession began in December 2007.In the meantime, companies have been enjoying the uptick in consumer business.Nate Evans, who owns a pottery-making business with his wife, Hallie, in New Albin, Iowa, said that their sales in 2009 were the worst ever but that they were just starting to see things pick up. The Evanses sell their pottery from their home workshop as well as in galleries in nearby states, and at crafts shows in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois.“I felt like the energy of the crowd was better,” Mr. Evans said of their first fair this year, in Minnesota. walking shoes
** As did other crafts sellers, he said. “Most of the people we talked to said it was better than last year. Hey, it’s not great, but it’s better than last year.”The biggest contributors to consumer spending growth were purchases of durable goods like cars. In addition to consumer spending, exports and nonresidential fixed investment also played a role in overall output growth. Businesses’ purchases of equipment and software, for example, grew 13.4 percent last quarter, after a 19 percent increase in the last quarter of 2009.Federal government spending, which includes remaining stimulus money, grew at an annualized rate of 1.4 percent in the first quarter of 2010. But this was more than offset by continued spending cuts from state and local governments, whose spending decreased 3.8 percent. It was the third quarter in a row in which state and local spending fell.“Government spending contracted, for all the ballyhoo about stimulus,” said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics. “This recovery is going to have to stand on the backs of private-sector demand, not on government demand, given all the current fiscal challenges.” Even though any pickup in business is welcome, modest improvement may not be enough to alleviate the pain caused by the so-called Great Recession, many economists say.The nation’s gross domestic product — a broad measure of goods and services produced in the country — is far below its potential, according to economists’ projections of where the economy would have been if it followed its long-term trend. Output would need to grow at least 5 percent annually for several years to get back on track — and perhaps more importantly, to lead to enough job creation to employ the 15 million Americans already out of work and the 100,000 new workers joining the labor force each month.Right now, many economists are expecting that the nation’s output will expand by closer to 2.5 percent pump shoes
** or 3.5 percent this year.“The economy is not any longer falling into a hole, but it’s also not getting out of the hole quickly enough either,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief United States economist at High Frequency Economics.
Government officials said late Wednesday night that oil might be leaking from a well in the Gulf of Mexico at a rate five times that suggested by initial estimates. In a hastily called news conference, Rear Adm. Mary E. Landry of the Coast Guard said a scientist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had concluded that oil is leaking at the rate of 5,000 barrels a day, not 1,000 as had been estimated. While emphasizing that the estimates are rough given that the leak is at 5,000 feet below the surface, Admiral Landry said the new estimate came from observations made in flights over the slick, studying the trajectory of the spill and other variables.An explosion and fire on a drilling rig on April 20 left 11 workers missing and presumed dead. 传奇sf
** The rig sank two days later about 50 miles off the Louisiana coast.Doug Suttles, chief operating officer for exploration and production for BP, said a new leak had been discovered as well. Officials had previously found two leaks in the riser, the 5,000-foot-long pipe that connected the rig to the wellhead and is now detached and snaking along the sea floor. One leak was at the end of the riser and the other at a kink closer to its source, the wellhead.But Mr. Suttles said a third leak had been discovered Wednesday afternoon even closer to the source. “I’m very, very confident this leak is new,” he said. He also said the discovery of the new leak had not led them to believe that the total flow from the well was different than it was before the leak was found.The new, far larger estimate of the leakage rate, he said, was within a range of estimates given the inexact science of determining the rate of a leak so far below the ocean’s surface.“The leaks on the sea floor are being visually gauged from the video feed” from the remote vehicles that have been surveying the riser, said Doug Helton, a fisheries biologist who coordinates oil spill responses for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in an e-mail message Wednesday night. “That takes a practiced eye. Like being able to look at a garden hose and judge how many gallons a minute are being discharged. The surface approach is to measure the area of the slick, the percent cover, and then estimate the thickness based on some rough color codes.”Admiral Landry said President Obama had been notified. She also opened up the possibility that if the government determines that BP, which is responsible for the cleanup, cannot handle the spill with the resources available in the private sector, that Defense Department could become involved to contribute technology.Wind patterns may push the spill into the coast of Louisiana as soon as Friday night, officials said, prompting consideration of more urgent measures to protect coastal wildlife. Among them were using cannons to scare off birds and employing local shrimpers’ boats as makeshift oil skimmers in the shallows.Part of the oil slick was only 16 miles offshore and closing in on the Mississippi River Delta, the marshlands at the southeastern tip of Louisiana where the river empties into the ocean. Already 100,000 feet of protective booms have been laid down to protect the shoreline, with 500,000 feet more standing by, said Charlie Henry, an oil spill expert for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, at an earlier news conference on Wednesday.On Wednesday evening, cleanup crews began conducting what is called an in-situ burn, a process that consists of corralling concentrated parts of the spill in a 500-foot-long fireproof boom, moving it to another location and burning it. It has been tested effectively on other spills, but weather and ecological concerns can complicate the procedure.Such burning also works only when oil is corralled to a certain thickness. Burns may not be effective for most of this spill, of which 97 percent is estimated to be an oil-water mixture.A burn scheduled for 11 a.m. Wednesday was delayed. At 4:45 p.m., the first small portion of women's mbt
** the spill was ignited. Officials determined it to be successful. Walter Chapman, director of the Energy and Environmental Systems Institute at Rice University, said a 50 percent burn-off for oil within the booms would be considered a success. Admiral Landry called the burn “one tool in a tool kit” to tackle the spill. Other tactics include: using remote-controlled vehicles to shut off the well at its source on the sea floor, an operation that has so far been unsuccessful; dropping domes over the leaks at the sea floor and routing the oil to the surface to be collected, an operation untested at such depths that would take at least two to four more weeks; and drilling relief wells to stop up the gushing cavity with concrete, mud or other heavy liquid, a solution that is months away. The array of strategies underscores the unusual nature of the leak. Pipelines have ruptured and tankers have leaked, but a well 5,000 feet below the water’s surface poses new challenges, officials said.Reached in southern Louisiana on Wednesday, where he was visiting the response team’s command center, Tony Hayward, the chief executive of BP, said he did not yet know what went wrong with the oil rig. BP, which was leasing the rig from Transocean, is responsible for the cleanup under federal law.Until Wednesday night, the well had been estimated to be leaking 1,000 barrels, or 42,000 gallons, each day.The response team has tried in vain to engage a device called a blowout preventer, a stack of hydraulically activated valves at the top of the well that is designed to seal off the well in the event of a sudden pressure release — a possible cause for the explosion on the rig.Mr. Hayward said the blowout preventer was tested 10 days ago and worked. He said a valve must be partly closed, otherwise the spillage would be worse.There are a number of things that can go wrong with a blowout preventer, said Greg McCormack, director of the Petroleum Extension Service at the University of Texas, which provides training for the industry.The pressure of the oil coming from below might be so great that the valves cannot make an adequate seal. Or in the case of a shear ram, which is designed to cut through the drill pipe itself and seal it off, it might have encountered a tool joint, the thicker, threaded area where two lengths of drilling pipe are joined.Still, Mr. McCormack said, “something is working there because you wouldn’t have such a relatively small flow of oil.” If the blowout preventer were completely inoperable, he said, the flow would be “orders of magnitude” greater.Mr. Hayward, of BP, said the crude spilling from the well was very light, the color and texture of “iced tea” and implied that it would cause less environmental damage than heavier crude, like the type that spilled from the Exxon Valdez into Prince William Sound in 1989. He said in most places it was no more than a micron thick and in the women's mbt
** thickest areas was one-tenth of a millimeter, or the width of a hair.Mr. Hayward declined to answer questions about any potential political fallout and said BP “will be judged primarily on the response.”As the investigation into the cause continued, officials, scientists and those who make their living on the Gulf Coast were focused on the impending prospect of the oil’s landfall.
Politicians like nothing more than a convenient foil, and Democrats locked in a stubborn impasse with Republicans over new rules to govern Wall Street believe they have found a gold-plated one in Goldman Sachs. Democrats say the convergence of their push for an overhaul of financial regulation and a prominent federal securities case against the prestigious investment firm is a matter of coincidence, not planning.But they have seized on emerging details about Goldman’s wheeling and dealing — recounted in a marathon bipartisan questioning of top executives from the firm on Tuesday during a televised Senate hearing — to put pressure on Republicans.“If the disclosures at these hearings are not the final nail that persuades the American people mbt shoes
** to demand this be done now, I don’t know what would be,” said Senator Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota. “To bet against your clients, to bet against your country, all for the sake of big profits. The timing is serendipitous but it should increase the pressure on Republicans.”Even as current and former Goldman executives defended themselves against charges of pillaging the economy, Democrats forced another procedural vote on the Wall Street regulatory measure. They knew they would come up short but were intent on juxtaposing the image of millionaire bankers parrying suggestions of greed and malfeasance with Republican determination to at least slow a bill calling for tighter regulation. Democrats said they would keep calling for votes to make their point.“Republicans will have more opportunities to show whose side they are truly on,” said Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada and the majority leader.If nothing else, the civil case filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission against Goldman has given Democrats a chance to highlight a cast of purported villains, embodiments of the forces that led to the financial crisis and the ensuing deep recession and faces at which the nation’s angry populist impulses could be directed.For hour after hour on Tuesday, Democrats and Republicans interrogated Goldman’s mortgage men, including the chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and Fabrice Tourre, the employee named in the S.E.C. complaint, putting them on the spot over Wall Street’s questionable conduct at a legislatively propitious moment.None of the Goldman executives have been found to have done anything wrong, but some Democrats were ready to place them in the same role played in past financial crises by high-fliers like Charles Keating, Michael Milken and Ken Lay, all of whom came to personify the excesses of the moment.The hearings were the culmination of a Democratic strategy to take full advantage of the opportunity created by the S.E.C. civil case.Top Democrats said it helped to put a face on an economic calamity that is as complicated as a synthetic collateralized debt obligation. But the real impact of the Goldman Sachs inquiry seemed difficult to gauge when it came to Republicans.While Senate Republicans joined Democrats in pounding on the Goldman executives at the hearing and expressed comparable outrage over what they described as blatant conflicts of interest in the structuring of Goldman deals, they confidently trooped over to the Senate floor to vote again to block the bill.They accused Democrats of trying to force through a partisan measure, sought to raise new questions walking shoes
** about the measure’s reach beyond the titans of Wall Street and noted that many Democrats had benefited more from Goldman campaign contributions than Republicans.Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said he did not believe Republicans would pay a political price for their resistance to the legislation, even with the Goldman case playing out in the background, as long as Republicans could make the case that they were trying to achieve a better end result.“What happens on Monday or Tuesday versus what happens later is something largely lost on the general public,” he said.Some Democrats, despite being aghast at Goldman’s evident willingness to bet against investments it was selling to other clients, said it was in some ways inequitable to single out Goldman when they might have just been the biggest and best at what became a Wall Street routine.“They were all doing this,” Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, said. “This was lemminglike.”Other Democrats said privately that the party needed to be careful in how far it goes in portraying Goldman Sachs as the chief bad guy in the financial collapse given the firm’s major presence on Wall Street, as well as in the world’s financial markets. Some Republicans have suggested that the Goldman developments are too much of a coincidence, implying that the S.E.C. lawsuit and Senate hearing were all elements of an orchestrated effort to provide momentum to the Wall Street overhaul and help Democrats break the Republican unity against the measure.Administration and Congressional officials strongly deny any such coordination and note that the investigative committee headed by Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, has been looking into the underlying causes of the financial crisis for months.Still, Democrats were not about to let such a prime opportunity pass.Moments after Republicans blocked debate on the bill for a second time, Senator Dianne Feinstein, women's mbt
** Democrat of California, took the Senate floor to note that she had been following the Goldman Sachs hearing.“Goldman Sachs will have their day in court,” she said. “But the allegations against the firm cry out for greater transparency at giant Wall Street banks.”