U.S.News & World Report Tumblelog

But women tend to be better educated than men, with more relevant skills, which means economic power will continue to shift toward women, as it has been for the last 20 years. The unemployment rate for women, for example, is 8.1 percent, while it’s 8.3 percent for men. During the recession, the gap was much bigger, favoring women by more than two percentage points for many months. That overall trend is likely to persist throughout the recovery. “Women are uniquely positioned to take advantage of jobs in tomorrow’s growth industries,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch wrote in a recent report, “and tend to enjoy stronger earnings growth relative to men.”

However, while foreclosures and slow job growth continue to be a drag on economic growth, there are a few glimmers of hope for the U.S. economy. Here are five reasons to be hopeful about the nation’s economic future.

Since the crash in 2008, the government has replaced the $1 trillion that disappeared by spending an extra $1 trillion themselves, as a way of keeping the party at Bernie’s going. But at some point the global capital markets will shut it down and discipline the U.S. government’s spending. The Fed’s program, QE2, is kind of a smokescreen because they’ve run out of other ways to keep the music playing. The capital markets are going to temper the federal government.

It will end with a Treasury auction failing, as almost happened five months ago in Germany. In fact, just recently the government bought back a big chunk of a Treasury instrument it auctioned off two weeks ago. That was either a disguised way for a Treasury auction to fail, or it was another disguised way to subsidize the Wall Street banks who took part.

These problems all flow from the fact that it’s politically popular to spend, and it’s not politically popular to tax.

Economic growth in 2011 is likely to exceed 3 percent, and perhaps even hit 4 percent. That would be the best performance in more than a decade. Workers who held onto their jobs during the Great Recession can finally exhale, with growing confidence that their job security is improving. Companies are grudgingly starting to hire back a few of the unemployed. And the latest stimulus and tax-cut plan out of Washington will put cash into practically every taxpayer’s pocket, just to make sure the economy keeps marching forward.

Yet the economic landscape in the aftermath of the Great Recession is littered with wreckage. Battered industries like construction and real estate won’t return to normal for years. A few states, including California and Illinois, are nearly insolvent, with tax hikes and service cuts the only way out. Homeowners have lost trillions of dollars’ worth of home equity, thanks to the housing bust. And the number of Americans who remain unemployed is far larger than at any time since the Great Depression.

For millions of Americans, in other words, 2011 won’t feel like a recovery at all, but like the fourth year of a painfully long recession. Here’s who is likely to feel it most.