Economy Is Still Weak, Fed Finds
The U.S. economy remained "lackluster" at the beginning of this month, with factory output and jobs steady or declining, retailers selling little more than they did a year earlier and banks finding little new demand for loans, the Federal Reserve said yesterday.</br></br>About the only bright spots the Fed found in the latest of its periodic nationwide surveys of business and banking conditions were growing orders for U.S. exports, a modest gain in new home building and a rush by homeowners to refinance their mortgages.</br></br>Otherwise, the president and Congress, who are under increasing pressure to take action to boost growth, can expect little help from natural economic forces until midyear, the survey indicated. Executives questioned by the Fed's 12 regional banks said they "generally anticipate that economic conditions will improve by midyear."</br></br>The year-end gain in housing found by the survey was mirrored in a Commerce Department report yesterday that showed housing starts rose 2.6 percent last month, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.103 million units. The December figure was 30 percent higher than last January's recession low, which amounted to an annual rate of only 847,000 units.</br></br>For all of 1991, however, housing starts totaled 1.015 million units, down nearly 15 percent from 1990, and the lowest figure since the end of World War II.