US continues to recover
ECONOMIC conditions continued to improve across much of the US in late October and early November, but a weak labour market and deteriorating commercial real estate sector remain dark spots in the US recovery, the Federal Reserve said yesterday in its latest beige book.
In the report, the Fed said conditions across many of its 12 districts have “improved modestly”.
Consumer spending has risen, home sales picked up and upward wage pressures were subdued, the Fed said.
And there were further encouraging signs as jobs data for November revealed that the number of jobs lost in the private sector and the number of planned redundancies both fell.
The private sector shed 169,000 jobs last month according to the monthly Automatic Data Processing report, compared to 195,000 in October.