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The financial experts we spoke to today say if you lay out the current economic trends and look at what has happened in the past, you can put together possible scenarios for the future; and they predict both bad and good news.
Despite worries over an economic recession, Black Friday spending was up. According to The National Retail Federation and the Utah Retail Merchant Association, shoppers spent 7 percent more this year across the country and 2.5 percent more in Utah.
"Business for us has been fantastic. We're up this year," said Suzette Eaton, owner of Hip and Humble.
But today the National Bureau of Economic Research says the United States has been in a recession since December of 2007. If the slump continues into the middle of next year, some economists say it would be worst downturn since the early ‘80s.
"Things could get a lot worse in the meantime if some of these problems aren't solved," said Gary Gygi, financial adviser with WBB Securities, LLC.
Intermountain Healthcare is solving some of its problems by cutting the employer-matching benefit in its workers' 401(k)s. For now, the cut is only for 2009 but will impact 30,000 employees.
"It's not unique to Intermountain Healthcare. We think that everyone is feeling this pressure from the weakening economy," said Intermountain Healthcare spokesman Daron Cowley.
A recent national survey shows 6 percent of companies have made or plan to make the same cutback.
"A normal recession is going to last approximately 18 to 20 months or so," Gygi said. But he says the good news is we're already a year into it, and stocks will rally just ahead of the economy as long as we can stay out of a depression.
"It's happened to a lot of people very quickly, but the numbers say we're still in the realm of a normal recession," Gygi said.
Utah is feeling the impact of the recession at a lower level than much of the country. Our unemployment rate is 3.5 percent -- three points lower than the national average.
E-mail: wjohnson@ksl.com