Market Gains Strength, But Recovery Still Elusive
Long Beach Business Journal
By Angela C. Allen
...The troubling mix of falling real estate prices and rising unemployment looks to be weakening as job losses edge lower and housing prices, while not rising, have at least stopped declining. Employers shed 247,000 jobs in July, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the least in any one month since last August, inching the national unemployment rate to 9.4 percent, down from 9.5 percent in June...
...Dr. Delores Conway, director of the Casden Real Estate Economics Forecast at the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate, points to a rise in the nation's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a reason for optimism. "The most recent GDP figure looked very good for [the] second quarter of this year," she says. "I think we're moving out of this recession, but the speed and the pace of the recovery is going to be slow...and it's going to be some time before we can start adding jobs..."
..."A lot is going to depend on the effects of the stimulus package...because that should be starting to have maximum benefit in this quarter...and also into the fourth quarter," Conway says. "[But] I think that because of the uncertainty in the job market,...until we can start to see stability and start to see job recovery, there will be pressure on the real estate market..."