Economists Issue Upbeat Forecast for Continuing US Growth
Barry Wood
Economists who keep a close watch on U.S.monetary policy（貨幣政策）met Monday here in Washington to discuss theoutlook（前景）for the economy. The Shadow Open Market Committee sees good economic prospects ahead.
The Shadow Open Market Committee predicts healthy economic and employment growth for the next several months. Analyzing just released statistics, the group says U.S. economic growth has averaged 3.2 percent for the last 12 months and five percent for the last two quarters.
Shadow committee chairman Charles Plosser expects growth will remain strong and interest rates steady. "We believe the economy is improving. It is improving at an increasing rate. And as an implication of that, that means more jobs and more money in people's pockets."
Mr. Plosser is an economics professor at the University of Rochester, New York.
The shadow committee, a group of academics and representatives of private organizations, makes no prediction as to when interest rates, now at a 45-year low, will begin to rise. But it expects no increase for several months. The economy has now generated new jobs for threeconsecutive（連續的）months, and the latest quarterly（每季的）growth figure was seven-point-two percent.
Another academic member of the committee, Bennett McCallum of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, faults the Bush administration for calling on China and Japan to stop manipulating the value of their currencies, and instead, let their values be determined by the market. "I just think this whole business of trying tobrowbeat（嚇唬）other nations into doing (what we want with their monetary policy) in a way that is designed to improve our realtrade deficit（貿易逆差）just strikes me as absolutely [crazy]."
The Bush administration, as well as both parties in Congress, are increasingly frustrated with the surge of industrial imports from China and the accompanying loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs.
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