Bloomberg: Unemployment at 8 Percent Is the New Normal as Growth Slows

“This is going to be a new era of frugality,” [David] Rosenberg said. “This isn’t some flashy two- or three-quarter deal. This is a secular change in household attitudes….”

The coming decade may, in some ways, remind people of those years during President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration, Rosenberg said.

“Life wasn’t so bad for the Cleavers,” he said, referring to the family depicted in “Leave It to Beaver,” the television show that ran from 1957 through 1963. “They weren’t up to their eyeballs in debt and they weren’t a three-car family with a 5,000-square-foot McMansion.”

Behavior by newly ascetic U.S. consumers, whose spending drives more than two-thirds of the economy, will translate into “less return to capital and less-remarkable equity returns,” said Milton Ezrati, senior economist at Jersey City, New Jersey- based Lord Abbett & Co., which manages $70 billion. “The whole picture is muted.”

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Posted in * Culture-Watch, * Economics, Politics, * International News & Commentary, America/U.S.A., Consumer/consumer spending, Corporations/Corporate Life, Economy, History, Personal Finance, Stock Market, The Credit Freeze Crisis of Fall 2008/The Recession of 2007--