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In the sentence “Forecasters obviously did not anticipate...
Text I
How good is the U.S. economy? It’s beating pre-pandemic predictions.
1 Americans might be reluctant to believe it, but on
paper, the U.S. economy is doing pretty well. So well,
in fact, that we’re performing better than forecasts
made even before the pandemic began.
2 The nation’s employers added another 199,000
jobs in November, the U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics reported on Friday. This means that overall
employment is now 2 million jobs higher than was
expected by now in forecasts made way back in
January 2020 by the nonpartisan Congressional
Budget Office.
3 The job market isn’t the only front on which we
have bested forecasts made before the pandemic.
The overall size of the economy, as measured by
gross domestic product, is larger than it was expected
to be around now. The International Monetary Fund
says that U.S. gross domestic product is higher today,
in inflation-adjusted terms, than it had expected at the
beginning of 2020. The IMF ran these calculations
for countries around the world, and found the United
States was an outlier in beating the organization’s
pre-covid forecasts.
4 So why did well-regarded professional forecasters
underestimate the strength of the economy? And how
is it that jobs and GDP are doing better than they
expected, even as inflation has been unmistakably
worse?
5 To some extent, all these things are related.
Forecasters obviously did not anticipate the pandemic.
They also did not anticipate the unprecedentedly
enormous government response to the coronavirus.
When the public health crisis hit and disemployed
millions of American workers, policymakers
implemented unusually generous fiscal and monetary
stimulus.
6 Such measures helped get people back to work
sooner, and avoided the long, painful effort back to
normal that had followed the Great Recession. Thus,
faster job growth. They also massively amplified
consumer demand, at a time when the productive
capacity of the economy (i.e., companies’ ability to
make and deliver the things their customers want)
couldn’t keep up. Employers faced all kinds of
shortages — of products, materials, workers — and
consumers anxious to buy stuff raised the prices of
whatever inventory companies actually had available.
Thus, faster price growth.
7 If you had asked me back in January 2020 how
Americans might feel about an economy with an “extra”
2 million jobs, unemployment less than 4 percent, and
inflation just over 3 percent, I probably would have
guessed the public would be pretty content. However
people are still furious about the extra price growth
they’ve already endured to date, and unimpressed by
all that extra job growth. Maybe it’s human nature for
people to view better jobs or pay as things they’ve
earned, while a painful price increase is something
inflicted upon them — even if both are, to some extent,
two sides of the same coin.
Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/
2023/12/08/jobs-report-economy-beats-pandemic-predictions/. Retrieved on: Dec. 12, 2023. Adapted.
In the sentence “Forecasters obviously did not anticipate the pandemic” (Text I, paragraph 5) the term anticipate could be replaced, with no change in meaning, by
A
precede
B
expect
C
need
D
hide
E
fight