ANCHOR (OFF-CAMERA) ENGLISH SAYING:

How good of a year are we looking at in 2014 in terms of the economy? We had a strong revision to GDP for Q3, so can we expect growth is going to be back closer to trend?

GUS FAUCHER, SR. MACRO ECONOMIST, PNC, (ENGLISH) SAYING:

Yes, I think we'll see growth in 2014 of around 2 and a half percent, ah that's going to be up from 1.9 percent growth in 2013 once we get the final Q4 number and that's going to be noticeably stronger. So I think that this year will be a noticeably better year than it was last year in terms of overall economic growth.

ANCHOR (OFF-CAMERA) ENGLISH SAYING:

And what's driving that improvement?

GUS FAUCHER, SR. MACRO ECONOMIST, PNC, (ENGLISH) SAYING:

Well there's one thing is that we're going to have less drag from the federal government. We're not going to have the big tax increases we had in 2013, there will be spending cuts but they will be smaller than they were last year, so that will be a positive. We'll also have continued gains in consumer spending, jobs are growing, incomes are growing, so consumers are spending a little bit more. And then we'll have better growth overseas which will support exports. So, Europe is coming out of recession, it's looking better. Growth in Asia will re-accelerate this year, so better export activity will support growth in 2014.

ANCHOR (OFF-CAMERA) ENGLISH SAYING:

Gus you mentioned that jobs will improve, that will be welcome news to a whole lot of people because job growth we know has lagged behind as this recovery took a while to take hold. What kind of job growth are we going to see month after month? When are people going to feel like the labor market really is improving?

GUS FAUCHER, SR. MACRO ECONOMIST, PNC, (ENGLISH) SAYING:

You know, we're going to see job growth averaging about 180 or 190-thousand per month in 2014. We're down about 700,000 jobs from where we were prior to the recession, so that's still, you know, 6 or 7 years later but I think we will hit a new employment peak sometime around the middle of this year and then we'll see the unemployment rate decline. So it's at 7 percent, it's likely to end this year at 6.5 percent, it'll fall a little more slowly than it did last year. I think the reason why is because we're going to have more people into the labor force. There are a lot of people who have given up on looking for work but as the job market improves, some of those folks will come back into the labor force and that should be viewed as a positive.