Some of this year’s business stories are easier to convey in charts than in words. Consider the astounding rise of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which reached its highest level ever. An old-fashioned chart from Google Finance shows 2013 as a row of pastel-blue stalagmites, all lined up on a slope and threatening to bust through the roof of their cave.
Reading the headlines, you might assume that JPMorgan Chase, one member of the index, had an especially bad year: there was, after all, that unprecedented thirteen-billion-dollar settlement with the Justice Department over mortgage bonds. Why, then, does the C.E.O., Jamie Dimon, seem so happy in his family’s holiday greeting card, in which he swings a racket in what looks like a massive indoor tennis game? Maybe it’s because, this year, JPMorgan’s stock price reached its highest level in more than a decade: investors, it turned out, actually appreciated the settlement, because it meant that the bank was close to resolving its lingering troubles.
But the stock price of JPMorgan and the other corporations that make up the Dow tell only a small part of this year’s story. The benefits of the economic recovery have, so far, been unevenly shared. “America's jobs recovery is proceeding on two separate tracks—a pattern that is persisting far longer than after past economic rebounds and lately has been growing worse,” Ben Casselman wrote in November in the Wall Street Journal. While wages are slowly increasing, and people with assets, like homes and stocks, are seeing their net worths rise again, young, less educated, and unemployed people are falling behind. As the year progressed, fewer people were working in the U.S.; as of November, labor-force participation had fallen to sixty-three per cent, its lowest point since 1978, as baby boomers retired and younger people continued to struggle to find work.
The uneven recovery of U.S. families has translated into an uneven recovery for those trying to sell things to those families. People spent a little more, from January to November, in grocery stories and drugstores, places where people of all income levels shop; meanwhile, those who could afford to make big purchases sent up sales sharply at auto dealerships. (Non-store retailers, which includes online outlets, also saw a big jump.)
People who could afford big investments also sent up home prices—and by far more than many had predicted a year ago. This was a good thing for those with underwater mortgages who have been looking to sell, but not so much for renters looking to buy their first homes, especially as interest rates started to creep up from historic lows:
This is all a little depressing for the holiday season, so let’s end on a nicer note. Despite it all, retailers remain as eager as ever to sell us things. This year, they found another promising place to show us advertisements: our smartphones, on which many of us—employed or not, rich or broke—are reliably spending more time than ever.
Vauhini Vara
from Currency http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2013/12/2013-the-year-in-charts.html
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