AP Survey: Painfully slow economic gains forecast for 2011

WASHINGTON (AP) — The job market and the economy will improve only slightly next year, according to an Associated Press survey of leading economists whose outlook for 2011 has dimmed over the past three months.

The latest quarterly AP Economy Survey shows economists are pushing back their estimates of when key barometers of economic health — hiring, spending, expansion - will signal strength.

In their view, shoppers and employers will stay cautious. Households will keep saving. Inflation will remain tame. And unemployment will dip only a bit from the current 9.6 percent rate to a still-high 9 percent at the end of 2011.

In the previous survey in July, the economists predicted unemployment of 8.7 percent at the end of next year. In the survey before that, they foresaw 8.4 percent. Some now think unemployment won't drop to a historically normal 5.5 percent to 6 percent until at least 2018 - several years later than envisioned earlier.

It adds up to a grim picture for the new Congress that begins in January. Voter frustration over unemployment is threatening to cost Democrats their control of the House, and maybe the Senate, in the midterm elections Tuesday.