These survey data, as well as data on capacity from various trade sources, should fully reflect permanent plant closings within, at most, a year or so.4 Most measures of resource utilization have not changed very much from a year and more ago, when inflation was falling.
The unemployment rate hovered near 5-3/4 percent through much of 2002 and the first quarter of 2003; capacity utilization has recovered only a fraction from its lowest level since the very deep recession of the early 1980s.