2014

It looks like the economy might actually recover in 2014. But will it? by Neil Irwin

The good news for 2014 is that those headwinds--the ones we know about--are already priced in. U.S. government spending cuts and tax hikes took place, but there aren't likely to be additional ones next year. Emerging markets continue on their moderate growth path, but there doesn't seem to be a collapse in activity. Europe's problems may have finally bottomed out, and its sense of acute crisis has long passed.

In other words, the forseeable things that dragged down growth the last few years look unlikely to recur. So the good news is that the natural resilience of the world's leading economies should have a greater ability to assert itself, driving the kind of expansion embedded in projections from the IMF, the Fed, and presaged by the new OECD numbers. 

State and local governments are a slight tailwind. 

Many false dawns however, as Irwin notes. How hard did the sequester hit the economy?