Word: boom
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...outskirts of Canton, the ballads of Country Singer Kenny Rogers boom across a small store where four youngsters are huddled over a Space Invaders screen. In the streets of Peking, long-haired young men in dapper trenchcoats walk arm in arm with girlfriends in high heels. Near by, in neon-lit consumer emporiums, grizzled countryfolk peel off huge sheaves of banknotes to buy TV sets to take back to their villages. The Jianguo Hotel is a replica of the Holiday Inn in Palo Alto, Calif. Not far away, Maxim's de Pékin serves haute cuisine at $70 a head...
Last week the Government revealed that March housing starts had taken the sharpest drop (26.6%) since records began to be kept in 1959. That disclosure, which put new construction for the month at an annual rate of 1.6 million units, dashed hopes that a major housing boom might be at hand. Such a surge had seemed pos sible just a month ago on the strength of news that February home starts were at a 2.2 million annual pace, the briskest in eleven years...
Nevertheless, increasing numbers of buyers seem willing to take the risk. The children born during the postwar baby boom are establishing families, and they want shelter. Some 40 million Americans are now 25 to 34, up 70% from 1947. Young first-time buyers accounted for nearly 40% of last year's housing market, compared with just 13.5% in 1981. The newcomers helped push the 1983 housing-start rate to 1.7 million homes, compared with an anemic 1.06 million level in 1982, and thus can claim some credit for last year's vigorous homebuilding turnaround...
...which is expected to come to about $180 billion this year. The heavy federal borrowing needed to finance that deficit is certain to keep pressure on interest rates and the home-buying market. A meaningful reduction in the deficit, by contrast, could lay the foundation for a genuine housing boom...
...serious reported crimes down only from the levels of 1980 and 1981, the highest ever recorded. But some criminologists are cautiously suggesting that the statistics do mark the beginning of a long-term decline. A principal cause, they argue, is the aging of the post-World War II baby-boom generation, which is now maturing from its most crime-prone years...