WASHINGTON – Discouraging economic data from around the world have heightened fears that another recession is on the way.
Fresh evidence emerged Thursday that U.S. home sales and manufacturing are weakening. Signs also surfaced that European banks are increasingly burdened by the region’s debt crisis and sputtering economy.
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The rising anxiety ignited a huge sell-off in stocks that led many investors to seek the safety of U.S. Treasurys.
Economists say the economic weakness and the stock markets’ wild swings have begun to feed on themselves. Persistent drops in stock prices erode consumer and business confidence. Individuals and companies typically then spend and invest less. And when they do, stock prices tend to fall further.
“A negative feedback loop … now appears to be in the making” in both the United States and Europe, Joachim Fels and Manoj Pradhan, economists at Morgan Stanley, said in a report Thursday. Both economies are “dangerously close to a recession. … It won’t take much in the form of additional shocks to tip the balance.”
The risk of a recession is now about one in three, according to Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
In addition to the worrisome economic signs reported in the United States on Thursday, investors are also growing more anxious about Europe’s sputtering economy and its leaders’ ability to resolve the debt crisis. European bank stocks accelerated their fall Thursday.
Some of Europe’s banks may be running short of cash to run daily operations, analysts say. A widespread credit squeeze, if it occurred, could infect the global financial system, as it did before the 2008 financial crisis.
The European Central Bank said Thursday that one bank had borrowed $500 million a day for seven days through the ECB’s dollar lending program. It was the first time since February that a bank had used the program. The bank wasn’t identified.
After all the volatility of the past month, the Dow Jones industrial average has lost more than 14 percent since July 21. That includes Thursday’s drop of more than 419 points.
Some sectors of the U.S. economy still show strength. Retail sales are up. Gas prices have fallen. And job growth has been consistent.
Yet a consumer survey taken this month showed confidence in the economy fell to the lowest level in 31 years.
Morgan Stanley’s economists forecast that Congress will let a Social Security tax cut, a business tax credit and extended unemployment benefits expire at year’s end. And they calculate that the expiration of those measures will reduce U.S. growth by 0.5 to 1 percentage point in 2012.
Jitters over the economy and financial markets may reduce auto sales. That would be a blow to an industry that reported strong profits and healthy hiring earlier this year. J.D. Power and Associates cut its 2011 sales forecast last week by 2 percent and its 2012 forecast by 3 percent.
On Tuesday, France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel held an emergency meeting to discuss the continent’s sluggish economy and debt crisis. Disappointment in the outcome of the meeting has contributed to the sell-off in European bank shares.
“All we got was more taxes and more bureaucracy and more austerity,” said Neil MacKinnon, an economist at VTB Capital in London.
Still, Neil Dutta, an economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said that most of the negative indicators, including the Philadelphia Fed index, reflect sentiment rather than actual economic activity. Measures of the actual economy, like the number of people seeking unemployment benefits, haven’t declined nearly as much.
More people applied for unemployment benefits last week. But the four-week average of applications, a more reliable measure, dropped to the lowest level since late April. The report suggests that the economy is creating jobs — though not nearly enough to lower the 9.1 percent unemployment rate.
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