By PATRICK McGEEHAN
Published: January 21, 2008
By most official measures, the New York metropolitan area appears to be shrugging off the economic troubles that have beset much of the country. With fears of an imminent recession spreading from California to Michigan to Washington, the latest data still show New York recording job gains and rising tax revenue.
On Thursday, the federal Department of Labor released a report with the headline: “Job count for the New York area rises by 80,000 over the year.” And while Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was recounting his administration’s fiscal accomplishments, the state’s Labor Department reported that New York City continued to add jobs in December in fields as diverse as finance, education, health care and tourism.
But few were reassured by those numbers as some of the city’s biggest private-sector employers posted their largest quarterly losses ever last week. Now, economists and city and state officials are acknowledging that 2008 could turn out to be far worse than their already dampened expectations.
“People may be overly optimistic about how resilient this city will continue to be in the face of a financial downturn,” said Jason Bram, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “The real question is how bad it will be.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/21/nyregion/21budget.html?ref=nyregion