WASHINGTON — Fresh signs that factories are coming back to life and a bank chief executive’s encouraging outlook fueled more hopes Thursday that the economy soon may emerge from the cellar.
The job market, among the last to turn around in an economic recovery, remains weak, though. New claims for unemployment last week were worse than forecast, and today’s reading on how many jobs the nation lost in March is widely expected to be grim.
The Commerce Department said orders for manufactured goods rose 1.8 percent in February, reversing six straight monthly declines and easily beating estimates of another drop.
“There is now some solid evidence that the period of economic free-fall is now behind us, that the next step will be a slower rate of decline,” said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist for consulting firm IHS Global Insight.
Gault predicted in an e-mail that the economy will bottom out in the second half of the year, cautioning that he did not believe the economy was yet ready to grow again.
Economists expect today’s jobs report to show U.S. employers cut 654,000 jobs in March, with the unemployment rate rising to 8.5 percent from 8.1 percent, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters. Some economists estimate as many as 750,000 jobs lost for March.
Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis also bolstered the markets when he told CNBC that the recession is “getting close to the bottom.”
