On the Friday before Christmas, Fox News confirmed that its chief Washington correspondent, James Rosen, had left the network. He had worked there for 18 years and become something of a legend. The U.S. Justice Department under the Obama administration was so frustrated by his reporting on U.S. intelligence about North Korea that it conducted a leak investigation into his sources.

The network cited no reason for Rosen’s exit and did not announce it on the air. According to Rosen’s former colleagues, however, he had an established pattern of flirting aggressively with many peers and had made sexual advances toward three female Fox News journalists, including two reporters and a producer. And his departure followed increased scrutiny of his behavior at the network, according to colleagues.

This story is based on interviews with eight of Rosen’s former colleagues at the Fox News bureau in Washington, D.C., just a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol. Rosen declined to comment to NPR after it set out in detail what it intended to report.

Rosen’s behavior was drawing attention from Fox News at a time when its controlling owner, Rupert Murdoch, declared there had been no allegations of sexual misconduct at the network since the ouster of the late Fox News chairman and CEO, Roger Ailes, in July 2016.

“There was a problem with our chief executive, sort of, over the years, isolated incidents,” Murdoch said in a mid-December interview with Sky News, another news outlet in which he has a controlling stake. He then said Ailes was gone in three or four days after complaints were made. (Murdoch actually ousted Ailes 13 days after former host Gretchen Carlson filed suit against Ailes on July 6, 2016. Five years earlier, Fox News had paid $3 million to settle allegations from a former network booker that Ailes had coerced sex from her. The Murdochs say they were not aware of the payment at the time.)

Murdoch went on: “There’s been nothing else since then. That was largely political because we’re conservative.”

Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox, Fox’s parent company, had to issue a statement cleaning up the damage caused by those remarks among outraged female employees. Many female former Fox News journalists other than Carlson had come forward to attest to sexual harassment by Ailes (all of which he denied through his lawyer before Ailes’ death in 2017).

Yet Ailes was not the only prominent Fox figure accused of sexual harassment. Top prime-time host Bill O’Reilly was bought out of his contract by Fox in the spring of 2017 after The New York Times detailed the scope of multiple sexual harassment allegations against him for which he agreed to pay settlements totaling approximately $45 million to quiet them; the host Eric Bolling was fired after being accused of sending unsolicited sexually explicit texts to several female colleagues; and other top executives were ushered out as having facilitated or tolerated such behavior. A midlevel Fox News executive, Francisco Cortes, was also fired in 2017 after being accused of sexually assaulting a former Fox News contributor.

O’Reilly, Bolling and Cortes have each denied any wrongdoing. A judge this week dismissed Cortes’ allegations contained in a lawsuit against 21st Century Fox that it fired him and leaked news of the accusation to scapegoat him as a public relations ploy.

21st Century Fox and Fox News say the removal of those executives and a raft of new procedures show the network’s commitment to offering a fair and welcoming workplace for women.

The Ailes and O’Reilly sexual harassment scandals inspired further revelations about related accusations against powerful figures across numerous media institutions, including NPR, which fired two male news executives last fall.

Current and former Fox News Washington journalists characterize the Washington bureau as retaining something of a Mad Men ethos, with some male reporters frequently sending racy “topline” notes through the network’s internal messaging service.

The accusations against Rosen, who is married with young children, are more severe than that. He developed a reputation as a talented and ambitious journalist called “the professor” on the air by former political anchor Brit Hume for his interest in Watergate (Rosen wrote a book focusing on the life of former Attorney General John Mitchell that argued for a kinder reassessment of his role in that Nixon-era scandal). Rosen has sent such messages, according to his former female co-workers. But in three instances he made overt physical and sexual overtures, according to the accounts of numerous former Fox News colleagues who heard about the incidents contemporaneously.

In the winter following the September 2001 terrorist attacks, a female Fox News reporter joined the bureau from New York. In a shared cab ride back from a meal, Rosen groped her, grabbing her breast. After she rebuffed his advance, Rosen sought to steal away her sources and stories related to his interests in diplomacy and national security. That’s according to four colleagues who say she relayed the episode as a warning about Rosen’s behavior. The reporter declined to comment for this story. (NPR has decided not to name the women in this article as they have not granted permission to do so.)

In a subsequent episode several years later, a female producer covering the State Department alleged that Rosen had directly sexually harassed her. A foreign national, she subsequently accepted a deal from Fox that enabled her to extend her stay in the U.S. in exchange for not making her complaint public, according to several of her former colleagues. The producer, who now works for a foreign-based news organization, is abroad with family and did not respond to several detailed messages left by email and phone seeking comment.

Late last spring, Rosen turned his attention to a younger female reporter, according to two colleagues who say she told them of the incident shortly afterward. Returning from a lunch together, Rosen physically tried to kiss her in the elevator ride back to the office, and once refused, attempted forcibly to kiss her again. According to a colleague, he then asked the reporter to keep the approach quiet and offered her unsolicited help in getting more time on Bret Baier’s nightly political newscast, Special Report. The female reporter declined to comment for this story.

Fox News executives say privately it takes time to reverse problems in a culture set from the top by Ailes.

Under a new top human resources executive, Fox News last summer placed a human resources employee in the bureau for the first time. In response to detailed questions, Fox News declined to comment on its Washington bureau or Rosen beyond affirming his departure.

Yet some female employees at Fox’s D.C. bureau say the company seemed late to turn its attention southward from its main headquarters in New York City, given the Ailes scandal. The bureau is a large outpost and a mainstay of the network’s coverage. Its reporters, producers and hosts serve up stories, segments and shows that help fuel Fox programming throughout the day and evening.

And employees interviewed pointed to earlier related incidents in D.C. The former Fox News correspondent Rudi Bakhtiar alleged that she was dismissed in 2007 after she made complaints that the new Washington bureau chief, Brian Wilson, had propositioned her. After she filed an internal complaint, Fox’s Ailes informed her she was being let go because of her performance. She was paid an undisclosed sum in a private settlement.

In another instance, Catherine Herridge, a former Fox weekend host who is now a Washington-based national security correspondent for the network, made a range of allegations in a November 2010 complaint filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — including sexual and age discrimination, unequal pay, and job retaliation for raising complaints internally. She alleged she had been subjected to a “glass ceiling.” She also said that Fox News general counsel Dianne Brandi had conducted the internal investigation even though she was one of the people identified in Herridge’s complaint.

The EEOC said it did not have sufficient evidence to support many of Herridge’s accusations but ultimately sued Fox News, alleging it had unlawfully retaliated against her. The suit was dismissed. Herridge and Fox signed a new contract and she remains on the air.

Brandi, then the network’s top lawyer, characterized the EEOC’s suit as “politically motivated.” Brandi is now on extended leave from Fox News, which is the focus of an ongoing criminal inquiry by federal prosecutors for its handling of payments to women who alleged sexual harassment there.

Rosen’s departure was a surprise — with no celebration of his achievements on the air, no announcement to viewers, nor much warning to colleagues. He had attended a holiday party for Baier’s show, Special Report, just a few days earlier.

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The job market is strong right now, with a 4.1 percent unemployment rate, and President Trump knows it. On Monday, he twice bragged about the latest jobs report, but he focused in on minorities in particular.

In the morning, he did it on Twitter, citing that black unemployment is “the lowest ever recorded in our country.” And he jabbed: “Dems did nothing for you but get your vote!”

And then at a speech to the American Farm Bureau Federation, he did it again, saying, “African-American unemployment is the lowest it’s ever been in the history of our records.”

This is the third time in as many days that the president has cited black unemployment figures. On Saturday, he also tweeted about the numbers.

Presidents often take credit for a strong economy, and Trump fits that mold, touting jobs and stock market numbers regularly. So we decided to fact-check Trump on this claim: Is he right, and are these numbers his doing?

The claim

Black and Hispanic unemployment are at or near record lows.

The short answer

Trump’s numbers are right, but it’s generally a stretch for presidents to take credit for job creation.

The long answer

Trump is right that African-American unemployment hit a record low in December. The unemployment rate for black Americans is currently 6.8 percent, the lowest level recorded since the government started keeping track in January 1972.

And he’s also right that the Hispanic unemployment rate is down a point over the last year — it was at 4.9 percent in December, down from 5.9 percent in December 2016. That is close to a record low, though it’s also up 0.1 point from November.

But still, fact check: true on Trump’s numbers.

However, that’s not all Trump is doing in this tweet. He is implying that he caused these low African-American and Hispanic unemployment rates.

And a big problem with that claim is that those rates had been falling for long before Trump took office, and their declines don’t appear to have picked up speed. This implies that there’s nothing specific that Trump did to change this rate.

Indeed, both of these rates have been falling relatively steadily since around 2010, early in President Obama’s tenure in the White House.

So have the unemployment rates for all races and ethnic groups tracked by the Labor Department. In general, these unemployment rates tend to move together. So while Trump called out the African-American and Hispanic unemployment rates, they haven’t changed in any remarkable way, relative to other groups’ unemployment rates.

Separately, the president’s Council of Economic Advisers touted the unemployment rate of other demographic groups on Friday, shortly after the latest jobs report was released.

“The overall unemployment rate, which by October had dropped to 4.1 percent, represented a 17-year low by year’s end,” they wrote. “The benefits of the low rates were felt broadly, resulting in unemployment rates for America’s veterans, African-Americans and Hispanics that reached historic lows in 2017.”

The total unemployment rate is quite low, at 4.1 percent. That’s not a record, but for comparison with that African-American rate, it is near its lowest point since 1972.

So Trump here is trying to make a political point — one that he has made before — seeming to tell minorities that they should support him more than they do. But then, the president has a decidedly uneasy relationship with black Americans, as NPR’s Brakkton Booker wrote on Saturday, and his rhetoric on immigration has also upset some Hispanics.

This leads to the bigger question of how much Trump has to do with any of this job growth, regardless of race or ethnicity.

By the jobs numbers themselves, it doesn’t look like he has changed much here. In fact, the average job creation in Trump’s first year is slightly lower than it has been in prior years. Employers added 171,000 new jobs each month, on average, in 2017. In 2016, that figure was 187,000, and in 2015, it was 226,000.

It is possible that the tax plan that Trump recently signed into law will inspire employers to hire more. Businesses could conceivably plow some of the money they save on their taxes thanks to that plan into job creation. In a late-November Yahoo poll of more than 1,200 business owners, half said the new tax plan would make them more likely to hire.

Then again, a majority of economists polled by the University of Chicago predict that long term, the tax plan won’t lead to higher economic growth.

It’s not that Trump has had zero effect on the economy. Though a strong global economy has been the main reason stocks are climbing ever higher, as NPR’s Jim Zarroli reported in December, the president’s agenda of deregulation and cutting corporate taxes has also likely very played some part in pushing stocks ever higher.

But the case that Trump has therefore significantly boosted job creation through the stock market isn’t particularly strong, says one economist.

“To the extent that that affects business decisions, it may be that the president is having some impact on employment,” said Michael Strain, director of economic studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “But it’s very important not to overstate that.”

There’s also a bigger problem with the idea that Trump has created all these jobs — presidents don’t have much immediate control over the economy, period.

It’s true that they push policies or make hires that can affect economic performance — George W. Bush first appointed former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who helmed the central bank as it worked to pull the country out of recession; and President Barack Obama signed the 2009 stimulus. It’s also true that at the end of any given president’s tenure, we look at the job market under that president.

But there’s so much about the economy that presidents don’t control — business cycles and other countries’ economic health, for example. The White House also can’t control broader macroeconomic trends, like the U.S. economy’s long-term shift from goods-producing to service-based industries.

Indeed, a 2015 paper from Princeton economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson found that while the economy has tended to grow faster under Democratic presidents, policy actions don’t appear to account for that difference.

“Democrats would probably like to attribute a large portion of the D-R growth gap to better fiscal (and perhaps monetary) policies, but the data do not support such a claim,” they wrote.

So could a president — with Congress’ help — target communities with particularly high unemployment? Yes, says one expert — particularly in one policy area Trump already has been championing.

“There needs to be a deliberate attempt to retrain and recruit people into the economy through infrastructure programs,” said Andre Perry, a fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution.

While the unemployment rate is relatively low — near what economists call “full employment” — it remains true that the black unemployment rate is always much higher than the national rate. He believes that targeted infrastructure policy could reduce that gap, helping disadvantaged Americans get back to work.

“Full employment means nothing to black folk in Baltimore or St. Louis or Pittsburgh,” Perry said. “For far too long, black unemployment has been the sacrificial lamb of full employment, and so again, if there is an infrastructure plan put on the table, it should be targeted at populations in areas that are largely out of work. [And] not only inner-city black America; it’s also rural white men who are being left behind by the economy.”

If that’s true, it seems likely to remain a hypothetical. Democrats and Republicans alike champion the idea of infrastructure, but partisan divides on how to do it remain so wide that passing an infrastructure package this year would most likely be a heavy lift.

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Dunkin’ Donuts has removed all artificial dyes from its doughnuts, nearly one year ahead of schedule, as the company continues to work to find replacements for synthetic coloring in its other menu items.

Rick Golden, Manager of Donut Excellence for Dunkin’ Brands, announced the news on Thursday, saying that “bright, colorful confections” are a hallmark of Dunkin’s doughnut lineup. The colors will remain, but the artificial colorings will be gone.

Last year, Dunkin’ announced it planned to drop artificial colors. The target date was the end of 2018. That’s still the goal for frozen drinks, other baked goods and breakfast sandwiches — but the doughnuts went au naturel, as it were, a little early.

“Our biggest challenge was replacing the artificial dyes in donuts with fruit juices and other extracts while balancing the flavor profile and bright colors,” Golden wrote. “It took years of research and development to get it just right.”

Some items used as toppings or decoration may still contain synthetic dyes, the company notes.

Dunkin’ is the latest in a long line of food companies to replace artificial colors with naturally derived dyes, which can be more expensive and more difficult to consistently produce. (Meanwhile, some perfectly natural colorings, like a red dye made from crushed insects, have also been known to ick out consumers.)

In 2015, General Mills announced it would be coloring Trix cereal with dyes made from the spices turmeric and annatto, as well as fruit and vegetable juices, instead of the old artificial options. Nestle re-did the recipes for 75 different candy bars to eliminate artificial flavors and colors. Panera boasted that it was dropping 150 different additives, including artificial colors.

Food dyes have been a particular target for advocates against artificial food additives, partly because they serve no health purpose, and partly because of specific concerns about their effect on children.

As NPR’s Allison Aubrey has previously explained:

“Some parents, including the sponsor of a petition aimed at getting dyes out of candies, believe that artificial colorings in food can contribute to hyperactivity in their children.

“But the evidence to back this claim is mixed. ‘I think there’s a growing body of research that shows that artificial food colorings can affect a child’s behavior,’ Andrew Adesman, a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics, told us. ‘On the other hand, these effects are relatively modest.’

“And, he adds, there’s no evidence that artificial dyes pose long-term safety or health risks.

“Adesman says it’s good that the food industry is giving parents more options to buy products that are free of these artificial ingredients. But he points out that eliminating artificial dyes does not turn chocolate bars into health foods.

” ‘They [can be] high in fat and in sugar,’ Adesman says — two things many of us could stand to cut back on.”

The same, alas, is true of doughnuts.

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The Dow Jones industrial average finished above 25,000 for the first time, as the long rally in stock prices showed no signs of letting up.

A strong report about hiring from payroll processor ADP helped push stocks higher. Financial stocks did especially well, and an increase in oil prices has benefited the energy sector.

The Dow finished the day at 25,075, a gain of 0.61 percent. Both the Nasdaq composite index and the Standard and Poor’s 500 index also finished at record highs.

Last year turned out to be the best for the market since 2013, with the Dow climbing more than 25 percent. It rose 4,000 points over the last 10 months.

“It was the first year in history where you saw every single month up,” said Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab.

Sonders attributes much of the surge in prices to broad economic factors, including low interest rates and healthy growth.

“I think the turn in earnings and the strength in global growth was enough to propel the market, and then the longer-term story has been just massive liquidity, courtesy of the central banks,” she added.

The Federal Reserve and other central banks for years funneled extra money into the economy through a process known as quantitative easing, to stimulate growth. They have also kept interest rates low, although lately they have begun to reverse course.

Jeremy Siegel, professor of finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, says the expectation of a large corporate tax cut and deregulatory efforts by the Trump administration probably played a part in last year’s rally.

Four days into the New Year, prices have continued to barrel ahead.

Earlier this week, the Nasdaq composite index finished above 7,000 for the first time, and the broader Standard and Poor’s 500 index also set a record.

But no rally lasts forever, and the prospect of higher interest rates could put the brakes on this one.

“We think the economy will be a little bit stronger, juiced a little bit by tax cuts, but we are getting later on in that cycle. Maybe we’re in the eighth inning or so,” said Paul Christopher, head of global market strategy at Wells Fargo Investment Institute.

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When it comes to reporting on Spotify and the company’s strained relationship with songwriters and publishers, it’s beginning to sound like a broken … system. But a possible fix is in.

Just two days before New Year’s Eve, the music publishing company Wixen, which manages the compositions of a wide cross section of artists from Neil Young to Rage Against The Machine, filed a lawsuit against Spotify over its failure to properly license those works before making them available to stream.

The new lawsuit is not the first (or the second or the third) brought against the world’s most popular streaming service over compositions, which are legally discrete from recordings and require a separate license (a “mechanical”). In fact, Wixen’s action is directly related to a $43 million settlement that Spotify struck six months ago over a largely identical suit against it that it hoped would sunset further court battles.

“Unfortunately, the Ferrick settlement,” reads Wixen’s complaint, referring to that agreement last year, “is still grossly insufficient to compensate songwriters and publishers for Spotify’s actions, as well as procedurally unjust.” It seeks a “total statutory award of at least $1.6 billion.” That language closely mirrors that of another legal action, brought against Spotify one month after the Ferrick settlement was announced.

The timing of the suit is inauspicious for Spotify — Wednesday it reportedly filed papers with the SEC for an initial listing on the stock exchange some time in the first half of this year.

While the reason for the suit isn’t new, the reason for its as-late-in-the-year-as-you-can-get filing is. If that settlement didn’t quite protect Spotify against lawsuits like Wixen’s (songwriters and publishers can opt out of the Ferrick deal) then a new piece of legislation will — and it’s the reason the company is going after Spotify now.

On Dec. 21, 2017, Republican Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia introduced that new piece of bipartisan legislation, which makes sweeping changes to the labyrinthine licensing system for compositions that has left many songwriters in the lurch and tech companies on the hook. It would also prevent lawsuits like Wixen’s from being filed.

“It’s the Music Modernization Act, and the Jan. 1 deadline it imposes forced our clients’ hands,” Daniel Schacht of Donahue Fitzgerald LLP, the firm handling Wixen’s case, tells NPR of the Dec. 29 filing.

“We’ve been working on this now for a little over 4 1/2 years,” Collins said in an interview with NPR conducted on Dec. 20. “We’re trying to provide a way so that [digital services] can provide the music they want to, have a safe haven where they can match the royalties, where the songwriters can also benefit — that they can get fairly compensated. It’s really is a product of a lot of hard work to reach a consensus. I have to admit, there were times during the journey that I would have — that I’d just throw up my hands and not find the answer.”

The Music Modernization Act establishes, among many other things, what tech companies, songwriters and publishers have needed but failed to create for some time: a central database that identifies which songwriter and/or publisher controls which composition. (A bill introduced late last summer by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., also attempted to address the database issue but was not taken seriously by the stakeholders involved.)

That database, while long needed, has never been created — or really even come close — mostly owing to its cost and disagreements about control of the proprietary information that would have to be held within it.

“It allows the digital service providers to have a central place to go for not only paying royalties,” Collins says, “but protects songwriters from them using things they shouldn’t be. But also, to give songwriters a place where they can be confident that they’re going to be compensated as well.”

To accomplish this, tech companies would foot the bill for its creation in exchange for a blanket license that would cover the compositions within it, helping them pay the songwriters who control those works.

Digital services “will basically be indemnified, where they will not be able to be sued, which is something that songwriters and publishers had to give them — with all these things, it’s all quid pro quo,” Michael Eames, president of the Association of Independent Music Publishers, tells NPR. Eames says that organizations like his, which represents smaller music publishers, could benefit from the bill. “We’re having to monitor and police our data in multiple databases through multiple vendors in order to get paid. It’s difficult, to say the least.”

The bill was drafted after consultation with industry groups that represent the major stakeholders involved, including the National Music Publishers Association, the Digital Media Association (which represents services like Spotify), ASCAP and BMI (the two leading performance-rights organizations) and the Nashville Songwriters Association International, among others. All support its passage.

However, Songwriters Guild of America President Rick Carnes issued a letter the day of the bill’s introduction detailing his organization’s doubts around the new law. Among his concerns:

… serious fairness, transparency and practical issues related to the proposed processes of setting up the licensing collective, the distributing of unidentified monies on a market share basis and the need to better protect music creator economic rights in that context, the vague nature of any opt-out mechanisms, the granting of relief from statutory damages liability to prior willful infringers, the scope of the musical composition database (including songwriter/composer information), the provisions concerning shortfall and other funding aspects of the collective, the absence of direct distribution of royalties by the collective to songwriters and composers, the vague nature of the audit activities to be optionally conducted by the collective, and the complications in that and other regards raised by obvious conflicts of interest issues.

Spotify declined to comment on both the Music Modernization Act and Wixen’s lawsuit. But considering its forthcoming public listing, it will have to assuage investors’ worries over a seemingly endless parade of litigation. Apple was sued on Dec. 28 over the same issue.

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Kari Pinto and her husband recently retired, and now they hope to trade Iowa — and its harsh winters — for a state with a milder climate.

But the tax bill President Trump signed into law last month has complicated their search for a new home.

“Now we just have another wrinkle in trying to determine where to go, and how much it’s going to cost us,” she says.

The new tax law is forcing a lot of people to reconsider whether they want to buy a home and how much they can pay, and that could affect housing prices, says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.

By the summer of 2019, housing prices nationwide will be about 4 percent less than they otherwise would have been, Zandi predicts. Prices could actually decline for higher-priced homes in parts of the country such as the Northeast, South Florida and the West Coast, he says.

Homebuyers will take a hit in several ways.

Starting in 2018, homeowners can deduct interest on mortgages only up to $750,000. The previous cap was $1 million, with an additional $100,000 allowed for home equity loans. Interest on home equity loans and lines of credit will no longer be deductible.

Not many Americans have mortgages that large, so relatively few will be hurt, says Sam Chandan, associate dean and head of New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate.

The doubling of the standard deduction on federal income tax will be much more consequential, he says.

“That means that for a lot of people around the country, it just won’t make sense to itemize and take advantage of that mortgage interest deduction any longer. So that doesn’t really hurt housing directly, but it does take away one of the advantages” of homeownership, Chandan says.

For the first time, homeowners also will face a $10,000 cap on what they can deduct on their state and local taxes. Some 95 percent of homeowners fall below that amount, so the impact of the change will once again be minimal in most places, says Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors.

“We don’t anticipate too much change for the middle part of the country, where home values are fairly affordable,” Yun says.

But in high-tax states such as New York, Maryland, Connecticut and California, many more people will take a hit.

“The homeownership rate is falling in California, because of the unaffordable condition. Now, with the tax reform it will make it even more unaffordable than before,” Yun says.

In New York, 20 percent of homeowners pay more than $10,000 in property tax alone. In New Jersey, it’s 30 percent.

Capping the tax deduction will make housing more expensive to own at the upper end and could gradually drag down prices in that segment of the market in some places.

“My gut tells me that it’s going to have an impact at some level. That is, I think it’s probably going to be in the $450,000-plus range,” says Richard Wight, owner of Ward Wight Sotheby’s International Realty in Manasquan, N.J.

“It’s going to have an impact on the disposable income of some buyers, which will in fact impact their qualifications to bid higher than they otherwise might have bid,” he says.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, NYU’s Chandan notes.

Many economists have long argued that the generous mortgage-interest deductions given by the federal government amounted to an indirect subsidy to home purchases and have distorted housing prices.

“When we subsidize something, when we make it cheaper, we’re going to get more of it. And so we get more housing,” Chandan says. “That in itself has acted to increase house prices, increased the extent to which we consume housing, has directed resources in the economy into the housing sector and at least on the margin have crowded out investment in other areas.”

That means the reduction in mortgage interest and tax deductions may actually benefit the economy in the long run. But for now, some homeowners could see the value of their properties fall.

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It’s New Year’s Day, so it’s time for football, hangovers, resolutions — and forecasts.

With the first three, you’re on your own. But for forecasts, we have economists to help. They get paid to peer into the future, and in general, they are seeing good times ahead, thanks to an upbeat business cycle.

“The stage is set for continued solid growth in 2018,” Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Markit, said in his annual forecast. “While economic risks remain, most are low-level threats to the overall picture for 2018.”

That view is shared by most mainstream economists and stock market analysts. Here are a few of the typical comments issued recently by experts:

• “Strong growth has helped move the economy to near, or even beyond, full employment,” according to Lewis Alexander, Nomura chief U.S. economist. “Overall, our forecast is for the U.S. economy to continue to grow above potential.”
• “I expect double-digit returns for the S&P 500 again next year (including dividends) with continued corporate earnings improvement,” wrote Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer for the Independent Advisor Alliance.
• “We forecast 8-10% returns for the S&P 500 in 2018,” said John Lynch, chief investment strategist for LPL Financial. “The S&P 500 is well positioned to generate strong earnings.”

You get the picture: It’s rosy.

The key reason for such optimism is the growth happening around the world. After a crushing global financial crisis that started in 2008, many parts of the world have taken a long time to bounce back. For example, Europe, which was hit hard by the recession, bounced back in 2017 and is on track to expand at a decent 2.2 percent in 2018, thanks to “falling unemployment, a competitive euro helping exports and a supportive policy backdrop,” Behravesh said.

When Europeans are in better financial shape, they buy more U.S. goods and services. And emerging markets are perking up too. Overall, global growth should hit a healthy 3.2 percent in the new year, he predicts.

Besides continued global growth, economists often cite these factors in their upbeat outlooks: tame inflation, low interest rates, low unemployment, tax cuts, pent-up demand for homes, productivity growth and improved consumer confidence.

For Behravesh, this is the bottom line: “Risk of recession remains low.”

Are there clouds anywhere in the sky? If one thing gives analysts pause, it’s the still-slow growth in wages. Consumers have perked up in attitude, but their income growth has continued to be restrained.

“Without sustained improvement in wages, consumers will struggle to maintain even today’s moderate pace of consumption,” said Lindsey Piegza, chief economist for Stifel Fixed Income.

So bosses: If you want the good times to roll, you might want to start the new year by giving your workers a raise.

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