Why Businesses Aren't Investing in the US

From CNBC:

Businesses aren’t investing in the United States because of a lack of consumer demand, International Paper CEO John Faraci said Friday.

“I think this was all about consumer spending and demand. You know, the problem we have is there’s inadequate demand to create jobs. We know how to respond when there is demand,” he said on CNBC’s “The Kudlow Report.”...

Consumer spending has been damped partly because the nationwide housing market has yet to recover, he said.

“Until it does, we’re not going to see the kind of consumer spending you would expect coming out of a recovery,” he said...

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Don Peebles, CEO of Peebles Corp., a real estate developer, said that housing remains a drag on the economy.

A strong market, cheap money and high leverage fueled growth before the financial crisis, he said.

“What’s happening now is the housing market is not able to carry the economy,” he said. “Americans’ wealth has been decimated as a result of the lost value in their homes.” ....

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Mort Zuckerman, founder of real estate investment trust Boston Properties and publisher of the New York Daily News and U.S. News & World Report, took aim at the slow growth.

Zuckerman blamed the housing-market collapse, as well as health-care costs and what he called an “inadequate, badly structured stimulus program.”

“Clearly, you should’ve had a GDP growth now of somewhere between 6 and 8 percent, with the degree of monetary and fiscal stimulus,” he said.


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Link: http://www.cnbc.com/id/47212263