The Economic Report of the President is an annual report written by the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. An important vehicle for presenting the Administration’s domestic and international economic policies, it provides an overview of the nation's economic progress with text and extensive data appendices. Read the report here.
From Christina Romer's blog at the White House:
The economic challenges facing the Nation when President Obama took office were among the greatest in our history. Last January, the American economy was truly in freefall. Real GDP was falling at an annual rate of more than 6 percent and the U.S. economy was losing jobs at the devastating rate of almost 800,000 per month. Our financial markets, having narrowly avoided collapse in the financial panic of the early fall of 2008, were paralyzed with fear, and borrowers of all sorts, from households to small businesses to large corporations, were having trouble accessing the credit necessary for normal economic activity. As a scholar of the 1930s, I can say that the threat of a second Great Depression was both genuine and terrifying.
But as great as the immediate challenges were, our country’s economic problems were also deeper and more long-standing. For nearly a decade, typical American families had seen their incomes stagnate, instead of rising steadily as they had for generations. Much of the economic growth that the United States experienced in the past decade was fueled by consumers and the government running up large debts, aided by a financial system better at making short-term profits than managing long-term risks. Rapidly rising health care costs were squeezing both family incomes and the government’s budget. And as a country, we were failing to invest as we needed to in education, new energy technologies, and basic research and development. Read it all
