Patrice Hill

U.S. economy adds 163,000 jobs; rate rises to 8.3%

The labor market improved last month after a soft spell in the spring, with businesses creating 163,000 more jobs in a wide range of occupations from health care to manufacturing, the Labor Department reported Friday morning.

August 3, 2012

Economic growth slowed to 1.5 percent in spring

U.S. economic growth slowed to a crawl in the spring quarter, trudging ahead at a 1.5 percent annual rate after falling off to 2 percent in the first quarter of the year, the Commerce Department reported Friday morning.

July 27, 2012

Employers work on health mandate

Now that the Supreme Court has upheld most of President Obama's health care law, U.S. businesses by and large appear skeptical about Republican attempts to repeal the law and are rushing to comply with it, surveys show.

July 19, 2012

Economy is in the eye of the policy beholder

Reading the economy these days is like taking a Rorschach test: Optimists see signs of progress in each economic report, while pessimists see the end of the expansion and many others host middling views.

July 8, 2012

Tepid job growth continued in June; unemployment rate flat

The job market eked out another month of modest gains in June as a major slowdown engulfed the U.S. economy. Unemployment was unchanged at 8.2 percent, the Labor Department reported Friday morning.

July 6, 2012

College grads find big degree of debt, difficulty

The Great Recession sent millions of Americans scurrying back to school to improve their chances of securing jobs. But the difficulty that recent college graduates have had finding work — after taking on unprecedented loads of debt — has sparked a lively debate about whether a college degree opens doors the way it once did in the job market.

July 5, 2012

Fed sounds the alarm on effects of European debt crisis

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday signaled strong concern that the deepening European debt crisis could drag down the U.S. economy and moved to prop up growth.

June 20, 2012

Federal Reserve extends program to prop up economy

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday afternoon signaled its concern about the weakening of the U.S. economy and extended a program aimed at holding down long-term interest rates to prop up growth.

June 20, 2012

Debt fight poses new risk to U.S. credit rating

Wall Street rating agencies are starting to sound warnings again about the possibility of further downgrades of the once-perfect U.S. credit rating as a critical year-end deadline for addressing the nation's mounting debt nears.

June 14, 2012

Economy on a steady course despite job scare

While Wall Street and Washington were obsessing over recent signs of softening in the job market and a flare-up of the European debt crisis, much of the rest of the economy has been chugging along showing improvement.

June 12, 2012

Workers still feeling the pain in paychecks

U.S. corporations are brimming with cash and reporting record levels of profits, but many workers haven't received solid raises in years. Some have had to take on the workloads of laid-off colleagues, but have not received additional pay. The jobs that are open often provide smaller paychecks than the ones Americans lost during the 2007-09 recession.

June 7, 2012

Declining number of union members affects all workers’ salaries

Today's depressed wages can be attributed to a variety of economic trends - from globalization and sending jobs offshore to new technologies and immigrant labor - but economists and scholars also point to the dramatic decline in U.S. union membership in the past 60 years, which has left rank-and-file workers without a powerful public advocate.

June 7, 2012

Unemployment rises to 8.2 percent; huge disappointment for Main, Wall streets

The nation's unemployment rate edged up from 8.1 percent to 8.2 percent last month as businesses from factories to office parks pulled back on hiring, the Labor Department reported Friday morning.

June 1, 2012

In Europe’s gloom, some rays of hope for U.S. economy

The Old World's worries are not necessarily bad news for the New World's economy — at least in the short term.

May 24, 2012

J.P. Morgan’s $2 billion loss renews debate on size

J.P. Morgan's announcement of a spectacular trading loss of $2 billion last week gives fuel to regulators who are inclined to slim down or at least stop the growth of such "too-big-to-fail" megabanks in the future, banking analysts say.

May 20, 2012

European voters clear: Austerity won’t be tolerated

Europe's election results were a stinging rebuke for the belt-tightening measures instigated throughout the European Union at the behest of Germany in recent years, while they make U.S. policies that have emphasized growth over austerity look enlightened by comparison, analysts say.

May 9, 2012

Germans getting ahead by getting along

Underlying Germany's vaunted manufacturing machine is a system of close collaboration among business, labor and government that has served the nation well in recent years and stands in marked contrast to the increasingly adversarial system in the U.S.

May 8, 2012

From pencils to Porsches, Germany has a passion for perfection

Whether you're looking for the perfect car, the perfect kitchen, the perfect sound system or the perfect watch, chances are that German-made products will end up at the top of your list.

May 7, 2012

Germany’s new strength has a foreign accent

Germany has leveraged its economic strength to take the leading role in addressing Europe's debt crisis, but ironically it owes much of that success recently to the appeal of German products in emerging countries such as China and Russia — far outside its traditional markets in Europe.

May 6, 2012

Unemployment falls to 8.1 percent in April, but Dow drops

The nation's unemployment rate continued its rapid decline last month, falling to 8.1 percent as another 115,000 jobs were added throughout the economy, the Labor Department reported Friday morning.

May 4, 2012