Economy

The U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 2.5 percent in the first quarter, well ahead of the paltry 0.4 percent in the final quarter of 2012.

Economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal were predicting that we would learn, this morning, that Gross Domestic Product had grown by 3.2 percent in the last quarter. Sorry about that; the economy said as the number came in at 2.5 percent.

Israel is facing numerous security threats, and yet the country’s most recent round of elections in January focused not on security but on the need to reform a dysfunctional economy and liberate the enterprising spirit of a nation that boasts more startups than Europe. Paradoxically, it was the success of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in stopping West Bank terrorism that gave Israelis the respite to finally tackle economic issues.

They come, they meet, they confer, they dash from television studio to television studio. Whether all of this to-do at the meetings here of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank signify anything very much in the world outside of policymakers’ conference rooms is unclear.

Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post writes:

To understand the American economy, you have to answer four questions. How can it be that unemployment remains high at the same time the number of job vacancies is rising? Will consumers keep buying cars and houses at anything like the current pace despite the recent increase in payroll taxes? How long will Ben Bernanke’s Fed keep printing money to keep interest rates close to zero? Finally, will Washington do what the president asks and get out of the way of an economy “poised for progress”?

The economy’s (and economists’) nemesis, Dr. Unexpectedly, strikes again, this time singling out retail sales strangling predictions for pleasing March numbers, as Alex Kowalski of Bloomberg reports:

Mark Knoller from CBS News reports this morning that President Obama, in a statement in the Rose Garden, “will stress his budget’s top objective is to boost the economy and create jobs.” To do that, he’ll have to contradict what he previously described as “the consensus among people who know the economy best.

While the talk among the political class is of guns and gay marriage, the concern out in the country is, doubtless, about jobs and economic growth.

This is a bad time to be a young American. As Ben Casselman writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Enough is enough. That isn’t a bad shorthand description of Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe’s new economic policy. Enough of lost decades, enough of deflation, enough of an over-valued yen, enough of wage stagnation, enough of the Bank of Japan’s (BOJ) “timidity.”