A survey of economists is published in the November 2012 issue of Foreign Policy. One question was whether we thought that the US unemployment rate would dip below 8.0% before the election. When the FP conducted the poll at the end of the summer, unemployment was 8.1-8.2%. Now it’s 7.8%. Only 8% of the respondents said “yes.” (I was one. I basically just extrapolated the trend of the last two years.)
My fellow economists choose defense spending and agricultural subsidies as the two categories of US federal budget that they think the best to cut. They rate the euro crisis as the greatest threat to the world economy now and are particularly worried about Spain.