Recessions & Recoveries

Overview As Congress debated the financial bailout bill over the past week, public support for government action has declined. A new Pew Research Center survey conducted Sept. 27-29 finds a narrow 45%-38% plurality of the public saying that a government plan to invest or commit billions of dollars to secure financial institutions is the right […]

Online activists and concerned citizens are using the internet to learn about the financial crisis, share their views on the proposed bailout, and organize their friends.

Overview By a margin of almost two-to-one the American public thinks the government is doing the right thing in investing billions of dollars to try to keep financial institutions and markets secure. Reacting to initial reports of the federal bailout plan over the weekend, 57% said the government was doing the right thing, while 30% […]

The story of the troubled U.S. economy has proven a hard one for journalists to tell. How have the media covered the slump? How timely was the reporting? Did the media influence public attitudes?

Overview The public continues to be extremely downbeat about the national economy. Just 10% say the economy is in good shape, while 72% say the economy is either in a recession (54%) or a depression (18%). On a personal level, concerns about rising prices have surged. Beyond widespread anxiety about energy costs, a growing number […]

Two men who are non-candidates for president drove the media story lines in the campaign last week. Jesse Jackson’s brutal remarks about Barack Obama may have helped the Democrats. Phil Gramm’s about the recession being largely mental did not help his friend John McCain.

Due mainly to a slump in the construction industry, the unemployment rate for Hispanics in the U.S. rose to 6.5% in the first quarter of 2008, well above the 4.7% rate for all non-Hispanics.

While the latest statistics reported fewer job losses than analysts expected, the public is expressing increasing concern about job availability; but unlike in the 1992 downturn, such worries are concentrated in the lower portions of the income spectrum.

At a time when the American economy is trending down and the unemployment rate is ticking up, one out of every seven U.S. workers fear they will be laid off in the next 12 months.

Americans feel stuck in their tracks. A majority of survey respondents say that in the past five years, they either haven't moved forward in life or have fallen backward.