Brown & Tedstrom, Inc.

More than four million children were born in the United States in 1990, the most in any year since the tail end of the baby boom in 1961. Twenty-two years later, in 2012, more than 1.8 million will earn a bachelor’s degree and either enter the workforce or move on to more schooling (graduate school). In addition, approximately 3.2 million students, most born in 1994, will graduate from high school this spring, and face the same choices as college grads. While the unemployment rate for those in the 16-to-24-year-old age group remains disturbingly high, more education and more skills can raise the odds of landing a job. The good news is that latest data on job openings in the economy, as measured in the Job Openings and Labor Turnover (JOLTS) data, reveals that nearly 3.8 million open jobs awaited this year’s graduates, the highest number of job openings in four years. The bad news is that many of those open jobs require skills and education that may not match this year’s graduating class. Read entire articles…

In our 2012 Outlook we wrote, “U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) is likely to produce below-average growth of about 2% in 2012, supported by solid business spending and modest, but stable, consumer spending” and that U.S. business spending would grow at several times the pace of consumer spending in 2012. With data on GDP now in hand for the first quarter of 2012, it appears that business capital spending has plenty of catching up to do over the final three quarters of 2012. While businesses have been generating record profits, leaving corporate cash flows close to all-time highs, they have been reluctant to add to staff or do much capital spending in early 2012, preferring other uses for their cash. Read entire articles…

For the third year in a row, as April turns into May, global financial markets are growing concerned over a slowdown in global economic activity. From a U.S. perspective, we continue to monitor several key metrics (as first outlined in the Weekly Market Commentary, “10 Indicators to Watch for Another Spring Slide,” dated March 22, 2012) and updated in this week’s Weekly Market Commentary. But the U.S. economic growth profile tells only part of the story, and in this publication we outline the growth profile of the rest of the world (Europe, Japan, China, and Emerging Markets, etc.) and put the evolving composition of the global economy into perspective. On balance, while our forecasts for economic growth in the United States, Europe, and China have not changed since we first unveiled them back in November 2011, there have been some noticeable shifts in the forecasts for economic growth around the globe in 2012 and 2013 made by the consensus and by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Read entire articles…