Unemployment to stay high........................................
Where's the "Hope"..........we can see the "Change"? :roll:
Where's the "Hope"..........we can see the "Change"? :roll:
SINGAPORE, April 19 (Reuters) - The United States faces a period of slower growth and high unemployment in the next five years or so as the housing market will not give it a boost anytime soon, a senior PIMCO official said on Monday.
"We at PIMCO believe that nominal U.S. GDP growth will trend lower to 3-4 pct from 6-7 percent," said Neel Kashkari, who ran the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) under former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.
"Unemployment at around 10 percent is going to remain high in the foreseeable future and then come down only slowly as the global economy recovers," Kashkari, who is now head of new investment initiatives at Pacific Investment Management Co (PIMCO), said at a conference in Singapore.
PIMCO, the world's biggest bond fund manager, expects U.S. home ownership levels to trend back to the 62-63 percent levels of a decade ago as housing starts slow and banks refrain from lending as aggressively as they did in the past.