This evening at 7pm ET:The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) ended their two-day meeting today the same way they have been for months now: keeping the target for the Fed funds rates between and 0.25%, and claiming that the economy continues to recover, albeit very slowly:
Although economic activity is likely to remain weak [...]
If you absolutely, positively need an optimistic outlook on the economy, Alan Blinder's your man.
' [...]Fed Chair Ben Bernanke has been named Time's Person of the Year
As the terrifying memories of free-falling markets fade, Bernanke has become a political victim of his apolitical success. His boldness in the crisis feels like yesterday's news. But if he's adopting a less aggressive approach to guiding a weak economy around [...]
"My main message in today's meeting was very simple: that America's banks received extraordinary assistance from American taxpayers to rebuild their industry and now that they're back on their feet, we expect an extraordinary commitment from them to help rebuild our economy," President Obama said after the meeting.
In the' [...]
Tony Makin makes the case for a crowding-out effect from fiscal stimulus via the exchange rate and net exports. Last week’s September quarter balance of payments implied a 1.8 percentage point subtraction from growth on the part of net exports, which is consistent with this story. Indeed, [...]
ONE of the more amusing bits of chatter from this morning's Pew-Peterson discussion on budget deficits involved one of the participants [...]
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Jim Bianco comments
Cramer was on Meet The Press yesterday with Alan Greenspan, Mitt Romney and Jennifer Granholm. About halfway into the discussion, he said:
The CEOs I talk to, they’re hiring. They’re hiring in Brazil, they’re hiring [...]
John Perry Barlow's 1994 Wired article, "The Economy of Ideas: A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Age," tagged: "(Everything you know about intellectual property is wrong.)", is a classic. Written at the dawn of the Internet, it's amazing how non-dated it is. It's a fascinating, well-written, [...]
All the recent critical attention which has been directed towards Greece of late might seem surprising to some (or part of a global anti-PIGS conspiracy, to others) since, on the face of it, the Greek economy had managed over the last decade to appear to be something of a success [...]
Here’s yet another reason why the Fed should not be driving interest rates to zero: It helps out far less people inthe economy that they imagine.
From the NYT:
“Mortgage rates in the United States have dropped to their lowest levels since the 1940s, thanks [...]
Richard Rahn is one of the few writers out there who keeps up with the underground economy and its size and scope - which is a fantastic thing to do because this is a leading indicator of the status of freedom itself. The larger the state, the larger the underground. [...]
It's hard to know how seriously one is supposed to take a Matt Taibbi who begins:
Obama's Big Sellout: Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed [...]
Various pundits have been putting forward candidates for the big human crisis confronting us. They all agree that something is, but can’t settle on one or another."It's not the first time a skyscraper has gone up as the economy swooned." Hmmm. Sounds oddly familiar.
Note: Corrected the second link. Thanks Mark.
' [...]This evening at 7pm ET:
Question: Do you generally approve or disapprove of the job that each of the following groups or people are doing in handling the economy?
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Answer:
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Source:
HART/McINTURFF Study #9747
December 2009 CNBC Survey
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/CNBC/Sections/News_And_Analysis/_News/__EDIT%20Englewood%20Cliffs/Toplines_Winter09.pdf
Say what you will about household debt and the blowback from recession, but Joe Sixpack and his spendthrift ways won’t go quietly into the night, recession or no recession.
This morning’s update on retail sales for November was a reminder that ours is a consumer economy and old habits die hard. [...]
Here’s my most-recent column in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. In it, I expand on the idea that people want, not opportunities to toil, but opportunities to earn income for themselves — and that, in a prosperous economy, nearly all such opportunities entail producing value for others.
I close my column this [...]
Here’s a letter that I sent yesterday to the New York Times:
Thomas Friedman writes: “If we prepare for climate change by building a clean-power economy, but climate change turns out to be a hoax, what would be the result? … [G]radually we would be driving battery-powered electric cars and powering [...]
