Mr. Obama announced on Saturday a rough sketch of a major stimulus plan that would add several million new jobs to our faltering economy. American workers will rebuild the nation’s roads and bridges, modernize its schools and create more sources of alternative energy, creating 2.5 million jobs by 2011, Obama said in the weekly Democratic [...]
A brief profile of Tim Geithner published last year at New York Times: “If the brave new world of finance is daunting, the man in charge of it is not. With a boyish charm and a dry sense of humor, Mr. Geithner has taken advantage of the current calm waters of the financial markets to [...]
How Bad Can it Get? My last blog on the economy was entitled: It’s Worse Than We Think. So what comes after, worse than we think? Worser is not a word, but it’s what comes to mind today when I see the latest employment and price data. The worser news began yesterday with the release [...]
Here is a link to the full text of the press release of the attendees: Press Release of G-20 Members There were two agendas at the G-20 meeting on Saturday: Strengthen the world’s economies and reduce the effect of the world-wide recession that is getting worse daily. Find a way to share the authority [...]
The evidence is mounting that the American economic downturn is going to be much worse than generally thought. A downturn that was thought to see unemployment at 8%, which is a recession level, is seen now to have an easy potential of 9% or 10%–levels not seen for decades–a deep recession. Here are the culprits: [...]
The five graphs below show with stunning visibility how bad the economy is today. Chart 1 shows changes in nonfarm employment from 1990 through the end of October, 2008. You can see the dramatic drop of 240,000 jobs lost last month in this graph. Also shown are the relative lengths of the last two recessions: [...]
From our friends at Economy.com we learn of a new international currency comparator: The IPod index. From their table below Australia, Indonesia, Canada, and Korea are selling the IPod for less than $140. Argentina, Brazil and Russia over over $250. This index gives you a good indicator of which currencies may decline in the future [...]
There is no longer any debate about the U.S. entering a period of a declining economy. Everyone who watched the leading indicators had been expecting a recession since the beginning of the year. Finally, in the third quarter, it came. Nor is there any debate about the global slowdown. It’s not that the United States [...]
Today, Friday, October 31, things just got worse for Senator McCain. In the major tracking polls, he has not been over 45% for the last three weeks, and over the last three days, while his assault on Senator Obama has intensified, he has not budged in the polls. At a time when he needed a [...]
Looks like we’re in for another round of fiscal stimulus. (Does stimulus come in rounds? Just asking…) Anyway, Menzie Chinn at the venerable Econobrowser blog revisits Mark Z.’s Congressional testimony from last summer, wherein he rated the relative oomph of various legislative stimuli. (Also available in this Dismal Scientist article .) Chinn avers: Onebig caveat [...]
