Economists

U.S. economic growth slowed sharply in the spring, stoking concerns about a weak job market, a drawn-out struggle for the unemployed and growing financial pressures on millions of American families. The nation's gross domestic product grew at an annualized rate of 2.4% in the second quarter, falling from an upwardly revised 3.7% expansion in the first three months of the year, the Commerce Department said Friday. While many economists had expected growth to moderate, the reported decline was a jolting 35% below the previous quarter.

California's labor market stumbled in April as employers in a wide swath of industries trimmed their payrolls, shaking the state's long-sputtering economy. Employers shed 4,200 jobs last month from such diverse industries as construction and hospitality, ending eight months of employment gains, according to figures released Friday from the state's Employment Development Department. The unemployment rate, however, dipped last month to 10.9% from 11% in March, the result of discouraged workers leaving the labor force, according to the department.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. trade deficit widened sharply in January, driven higher by record imports of autos, capital goods and food, government data showed. The trade gap expanded 4.3% in January to $52.6 billion from $50.4 billion in December, the Commerce Department said Friday. This is the largest monthly differential between imports and exports since October 2008 and came in much bigger than expected. Analysts surveyed by MarketWatch had predicted that the deficit would reach $49 billion.

WASHINGTON — Growth in service industries, which make up 90% of the U.S. economy, slowed in April after surging the previous month, according to a leading gauge. The Institute for Supply Management said Thursday that its index of nonmanufacturing businesses fell to 53.5 last month, down from 56 in March. The drop was steeper than economists had been projecting and brought the index to its lowest level since November's 52.6. The April data came after the ISM reported Tuesday that manufacturing jumped in April to a 10-month high.

Prosperity is feared by conservative economists as a threat to economic stability. BERTRAM R. FORER Westlake Village

Economists brushed off a decline in new residential construction starts last month and instead looked at an increase in permits issued for houses and apartment buildings as a positive indicator that the real estate market is on the mend. Housing starts fell 1.1% from the prior month to hit a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 698,000, the Commerce Department reported. That was a 34.7% surge from February last year. Starts were down 5.9% from the prior month in the West and 12.3% in the Northeast.

This just in: The recession ended more than a year ago — in June 2009. That may seem perplexing, given the sour state of the economy, but the panel of experts designating when serious economic downturns begin and end typically takes a year or so to make the calls. Even so, minutes after the experts announced Monday that the worst recession in more than half a century had officially ended 15 months ago, its members felt the sting of indignant reaction from a public for whom economic pain continues to be an everyday reality.

It seems that some people never fail to get worked up at the sight of young people standing up to an entrenched power. That's the only way I can explain the vehement reaction to my recent Op-Ed article, " Not their fathers' economics ," about the budding movement against orthodox economics among students from around the world. The general dismissive attitude seems to be that these students have no real right to speak their minds because they're so young that they haven't had a chance to be fully informed.

It's too early to say the recession is over, according to the group of economists who make the official call on U.S. expansions and contractions. The National Bureau of Economic Research said Monday that its business cycle dating committee met to discuss whether to declare that the economy had reached a trough in the recession that began at the end of 2007. Recent speculation had been that the group would say the downturn ended last summer. But the economists opted to stay on the side of caution.

Economists brushed off a decline in new residential construction starts last month and instead looked at an increase in permits issued for houses and apartment buildings as a positive indicator that the real estate market is on the mend. Housing starts fell 1.1% from January to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 698,000, the Commerce Department reported. That was a 34.7% surge from February 2011. Starts were down 5.9% from January in the West and 12.3% in the Northeast. They were up 1.5% in the South and 3.0% in the Midwest.

WASHINGTON - On the first Friday of every month, at precisely 8:30 a.m., the Bureau of Labor Statistics flicks a switch and the latest clue about the U.S. economy - the jobs report - gets transmitted all over the world. And then the frenzy begins. Politicians in Washington race for the mikes to proclaim that the economy is back, or maybe falling into an abyss. Investors from Brussels to Bangkok win and lose billions. And in American factories, offices and living rooms, you can almost hear a collective groan of dismay or sigh of relief.

It seems that some people never fail to get worked up at the sight of young people standing up to an entrenched power. That's the only way I can explain the vehement reaction to my recent Op-Ed article, " Not their fathers' economics ," about the budding movement against orthodox economics among students from around the world. The general dismissive attitude seems to be that these students have no real right to speak their minds because they're so young that they haven't had a chance to be fully informed.

From the day he entered the White House, the biggest threat to Barack Obama's chances of becoming a two-term president has been the battered state of the U.S. economy. There have been new signs of trouble this spring: slower job growth, higher gasoline prices and fresh fears over the European debt crisis. Yet Obama's prospects on the economic front may be brighter than they now look. This past weekend brought encouraging signs that Europe is ready to take stronger action to confront its still-serious debt problems.

UC, then and now Re "Bring back the idea of free UC," Column, April 11 My husband and I started at UCLA in 1966; our fees were about $80 per quarter. I applied only to UCLA, where I was virtually assured a spot because of my 3.0 grade point average. I had the best education money could buy. Every time fees increased, I feared that tuition would be next and that one of the best university systems in the country would be placed out of reach of most California students.

BEIJING — China's roaring economy cooled the first three months of this year to its slowest pace of growth in three years because of slackening export demand and a weakened property market. The country's gross domestic product expanded 8.1% in the first quarter compared with a year earlier, China's National Bureau of Statistics said Friday. That's down from 8.9% growth in the fourth quarter last year and below many analysts' expectations. The figure could spook investors and prolong fears of a potential hard landing for the world's second-largest economy after years of unsustainably high growth.

WASHINGTON — Job growth slowed sharply last month, raising fresh questions about the strength of the recovery and complicating, for the moment, President Obama's ability to run for reelection on the wave of a resurgent economy. Employers nationwide added a modest 120,000 new positions in March, only about half the job gains in each of the previous three months, the Labor Department reported Friday. Some of the falloff, analysts said, reflected the fact that payrolls had been inflated in the winter because of unusually mild weather.

It is true that Clinton has spurned conventional economics and its associated priesthood of academics who resemble quantum physicists rather than humanists. But wasn't the message of Clinton's campaign change, chance, change? And doesn't the fact that traditional economic theory has failed to cure our recession provide enough reason to try a new approach? As an impressionable undergraduate at Berkeley, I aspired to become an economist because I saw how clearly basic economic theories can explain the processes of our society.

In a sign that Americans are persisting in the risky habit of buying more than they sell in the global economy, the U.S. trade deficit jumped unexpectedly in May to the highest level since November 2008. That prompted some analysts to cut back their forecasts of how much the economy would grow in the second quarter and to warn that the underlying imbalance posed a threat to the nation's long-term prosperity and economic strength. "Definitely the weakness in trade through May suggests less momentum in the economy," said Shawn DuBravac, chief economist for the Consumer Electronics Assn.

Add another catchphrase to the lexicon of home-price-obsessed economists: “deceleration.” It's either a signal of how closely watched the housing market is these days or just how desperate people are for good news. But economists and other observers are suddenly obsessed with housing's slowing decline. The latest example came Wednesday when Santa Ana data firm CoreLogic released its home price index that, including distressed sales, showed U.S. prices in February dropped 0.8% from January and down 2.0% from February 2011.

Economists generally don't go into politics, which is probably a good thing for Christopher Thornberg , who has declared war on Proposition 13 . The popular 1978 ballot measure that capped property taxes in California is “one of the most horrendous, unfair, regressive taxes in the history of the United States,” the former UCLA economist declared at a televised hearing in Sacramento earlier this month. (You can view it here , starting at about 31:36 minutes.) Zap!