If you were hoping for some economic good news to close out July, forget it. Not only did the Commerce Department offer up a gloomy assessment of the second-quarter gross domestic product, it also said the recession of 2007-9 was deeper and the recovery slower than we thought.
As Catherine Rampell reports, the G.D.P. — that closely watched measurement of economic output — grew at an annual rate of only 1.3 percent in the second quarter. That’s barely breathing. In fact, the economy over all is smaller now than when the recession began in 2007, she says.
In the Weekend Business podcast, Ms. Rampell offers up one tiny bright spot: automobile sales were not as bad as expected.
Meanwhile, the Fundamentally columnist for Sunday Business, Paul Lim, urges investors not to run away from stocks in European companies, despite economic uncertainty there. In a podcast interview with Phyllis Korkki, he argues that European companies have fared slightly better over all than their American counterparts.
Steve Lohr talks with the Sunday Business editor, David Gillen, about his article in this week’s section on Microsoft’s high hopes for the search engine Bing — its David to the Goliath Google. And Gregory Mankiw, the Harvard economist, writing in the Economic View column, defends the performance of Ben S. Bernanke, the regularly pummeled chairman of the Federal Reserve.
You can find specific segments of the podcast at these junctures: the G.D.P. report (31:09); news summary (22:52); Microsoft (19:46); Gregory Mankiw (12:45); European stocks (6:24); the week ahead (0:51).
As articles discussed in the podcast are published during the weekend, links will be added to this post.
You can download the program by subscribing from The New York Times’s podcast page or directly from iTunes.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=679b219666eab3eda39ddf01b95bdcce
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