California Recovery Continues at a "Painfully Plodding" Pace
UCLA Anderson Forecast's third quarterly report of 2014 indicates that the real Gross Domestic Product for the United States will grow at about 3 percent over the next two years, following a decline of 2.1 percent in the first quarter of this year and a rebound of 4.2 percent growth in the second. On an annual basis, GDP growth will rebound a full percentage point in 2015 to 3.1 percent and to 3.4 percent in 2016. Payroll job growth should average 230,000 per month; by the end of 2016 the unemployment rate will drop to 5.3 percent. In California, employment growth is forecast to be 2.4 percent in 2015 and 2.2 percent in 2016, which will drive down the unemployment rate to 5.7 percent by 2016, just 0.3 percent higher than the U.S. rate.