Fiscal Outlook
Five of 12 Fed districts expressed concern about next year’s outlook, partly due to the lack of clarity about the budget, the report said.
“Business levels are not bad,” Jerald Fishman, chief executive officer at chipmaker Analog Devices Inc., said on a Nov. 27 call with analysts. Still, “there’s so much uncertainty out there in Europe and the U.S.”
Fishman said that because of a lack of clarity on government tax policies, “people are just standing still and that impacts their capital spending budget.”
The economy may rely more on housing as manufacturing slows. Construction spending climbed 1.4 percent in October, the most since May, after a 0.5 percent advance, the Commerce Department reported today in Washington.
The reading exceeded all 45 estimates in a Bloomberg survey of economists, in which the median projection was for a 0.5 percent increase. Home construction jumped to the highest level since November 2008.