business cycle

Having committed itself to ultralow interest rates and quantitative easing, the Fed is now caught in a double bind: Continue those policies and keep pumping money into speculative, inflation-hiking commodity bets -- or end them and let rates rise, with the harmful economic impact.

In my previous column, I argued that the business cycle has more pain in store, even as unemployment grows. My goal in this column is to make a realistic appraisal of the possibility that unemployment could continue to rise after the $787 billion Federal stimulus spending runs its course next...

As my colleague Douglas McIntyre described in "Unemployment problems are worse than meet the eye," unemployment in this recession is different -- what many are calling structural unemployment, meaning a decline in the jobs base, which is not going to bounce back quickly due to deep structural...