The big picture looks better
Posted on November 19, 2009 at 11:18 amThe Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has doubled its 2010 growth forecast for the world’s largest economies.
“We now have numbers that support a recovery in motion,” Jorgen Elmeskov, the OECD’s acting chief economist, said in an interview. “It’s still a slow recovery because of considerable headwinds from the need to adjust the balance sheets of households, enterprises and financial sectors.”
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Don’t believe the bad news
Posted on October 29, 2009 at 9:30 am
Mark Perry says reports of discouraged and disenchanted consumers need to be discounted a good bit. The world looked just as bleak coming out of the last few recessions.
Consumer confidence remained low for two years following the end of the 1990-1991 recession and it took about three years for consumer confidence to rise to the pre-recession level. The circled pattern following the 2001 recession was similar.
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GDP growth tops estimates
Posted on at 7:44 amThe consensus from economists on third-quarter economic acticity had been growth of 3.3 percent. The Bureau of Economic Analysis says it was a little higher than that, with the auto industry — thanks to cash for clunkers — accounting for almost half of the growth.
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The case for a scorching 2010
Posted on October 28, 2009 at 7:28 am
Formula Capital’s James Altucher says a double dip isn’t his main concern for the coming year. The hedge fund manager is more anxious about rip-roaring economic growth — powered by companies replenishing inventories and the stimulus doing its thang — and a huge run up in the stock market.
“It’s gonna be enormous… We’re barely going to look back.”
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‘A little less cautious’ versus ‘Crash for clunkers’
Posted on October 15, 2009 at 7:36 amSeptember retail sales came in better than expected, but opinions vary widely about where the consumer — and hence the economy — goes from here. Phil Izzo at the Journal collects some thoughts that span the spectrum.
While it looks like Wall Street employees will have the cash to buy holiday gifts, the country is a lot bigger and today’s retail sales give some pause to the notion that the economy has positively turned positive.
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Crunching the numbers on the stimulus’ job impact
Posted on October 13, 2009 at 11:24 amEconomist Brad DeLong rips apart a Washington Post piece and offers up some basic math to help us get a better grasp on how spending trillions of dollars affects our daily lives.
That looks like a very good deal: buying an extra productive job for an American today at a cost of $2000 per year in higher taxes looking forward–particularly when you think that some of those extra jobs build up our productive capacity to make us richer in the future as well.
Mark Thoma follows up with some more perspective on the political dynamics of a crummy labor market:
I don’t understand why the left has allowed its hands to be tied be the GOP’s framing of the stimulus issue. Of course it’s a political non-starter if you don’t fight back and present alternative arguments. There are benefits to stabilizing the economy by shifting demand from the good times to the bad times even if it doesn’t affect future economic growth (one could even argue that slightly lower growth is an acceptable trade off for enhanced stability, but that too is a political non-starter). People need jobs, and we need to put the policies in place - whatever those are - that can provide them.
Four years till the good ol’ days
Posted on September 25, 2009 at 12:22 am
MTSU’s David Penn says it will take the Middle Tennessee job market until 2014 to recreate all the jobs that have been lost during this recession. On the flip side, that creation should begin by the end of the year, Penn told Thursday’s Economic Outlook Conference.
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The government’s money isn’t helping the people
Posted on September 24, 2009 at 8:01 amFormer Labor Secretary Robert Reich says all those federal billions being pumped into the economy aren’t making their way to the common man and woman.
Despite the happy Dow and notwithstanding the upbeat corporate earnings, most corporations are still shedding workers and slashing payrolls. And the big banks still aren’t lending to Main Street.
Trickle-down economics didn’t work when the supply-siders were in charge. And it’s not working now, at a time when — despite all their cries of “socialism” — big business and Wall Street are more politically potent than ever.
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Summing up today’s economy
Posted on September 21, 2009 at 1:01 pmJim Hamilton at Econbrowser does a nice job sifting through recent economic statistics, acknowledging the improvements coming from several areas, but still not walking away with a smile.
I see this as more than the conventional hand-wringing about a “jobless recovery.” That phrase might suggest that we’re just talking about a replay of the anemic recovery that followed the 2001 recession. In the first 6 months of 2002, nonfarm payrolls fell by 350,000, or 58,000 per month. In July and August of 2009, payrolls fell by 492,000. If the recession really ended in June, as some claim, this is a much more serious problem than we saw in 2002-2003.
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State jobless number up another tick
Posted on September 17, 2009 at 2:07 pmTennessee’s unemployment rate rose 0.1 percentage point in August to 10.8 percent, meaning more than 325,000 Tennesseans are now without work. That’s up 120,000 people from a year ago — a number that does not include the 35,000 people by which the state’s work force has shrunk over the past year.
‘There is no doubt that home prices will go down dramatically from here’
Posted on September 10, 2009 at 8:46 am
Noted bank analyst Meredith Whitney says unemployment, slow consumer spending and a continued lack of consumer and small-business credit spells more trouble for residential real estate.
“No bank underwrote a loan with 10 percent unemployment on the horizon,” Whitney said. “I think there is no doubt that home prices will go down dramatically from here, it’s just a question of when.”
One group of forecasters bullish and unswayed
Posted on September 8, 2009 at 6:59 am
From this morning’s Investor’s Business Daily:
The Economic Cycle Research Institute, which called the recession’s end before most analysts did, is staying with its forecast for a rapid and sustained recovery. The Fed and many private economists think U.S. growth will be sluggish after a late ’09 pop. But the ECRI leading U.S. index’s annualized growth has hit a 38-year high of 20.8%.
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Fed official tells Rotary we need more structure
Posted on July 20, 2009 at 3:22 pmAtlanta Federal Reserve President Dennis Lockhart told the Downtown Rotary today that economic growth is returning, but it won’t be gangbusters anytime soon.
The recovery will be weak compared with historic recoveries from recession. The recovery will be weak because the economy must make structural adjustments before the healthiest possible rate of growth can be achieved.
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Buffett doesn’t see a bounce
Posted on June 24, 2009 at 5:25 pm
The sage of Omaha isn’t upbeat about the state of the economy.
I get figures on 70-odd businesses, a lot of them daily. Everything that I see about the economy is that we’ve had no bounce.
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Study: Green investments would create 10,000 Nashville jobs
Posted on June 18, 2009 at 1:37 pm
A report from UMass researchers, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Green for All says that ramping up Middle Tennessee clean-energy investments of $815 million a year — a figure based on what a think tank sees being generated by stimulus, subsidies and the like — will generate more than 10,000 jobs in the region, more than half of them for people with high-school degrees or less.
The $815 million number is based on a $150 billion national number that amounts to 1.1 percent of GDP. For some perspective, that amount equates to the construction of five Pinnacle at Symphony Place office towers every year.
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