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9:25 AM, May 1, 2013 • By GEOFFREY NORMANThe first of this week's three big employment numbers was released this morning. Tomorrow, we will learn the first-time claims number. Friday, the unemployment number and rate for the previous month. As this item from Reuters indicates, the signs are not good:
Read more... 12:00 AM, Apr 27, 2013 • By IRWIN M. STELZERThe 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.
Read more... 9:33 AM, Apr 26, 2013 • By GEOFFREY NORMANEconomists 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.
Read more... 2:56 PM, Apr 24, 2013 • By GEOFFREY NORMANThe economy can't quite seem to gets its feet under it. As soon as it shows signs of steadying itself and begins to move forward, its legs go wobbly and we get things like this, from Lorraine Woellert at Bloomberg:
Read more... 11:50 AM, Apr 22, 2013 • By DANIEL DORONIsrael 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.
Read more... 12:00 AM, Apr 20, 2013 • By IRWIN M. STELZERThey 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.
Read more... 11:02 AM, Apr 15, 2013 • By GEOFFREY NORMANHardly anything in this world of chaos and surprise is so reliable as that the latest figures on the economy will turn out to be "unexpected. As, for instance, confidence among homebuilders as reported this morning on Bloomberg.
Read more... 12:00 AM, Apr 13, 2013 • By IRWIN M. STELZERTo 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”?
Read more... 12:47 PM, Apr 12, 2013 • By GEOFFREY NORMANThe 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:
Read more... 10:30 AM, Apr 10, 2013 • By STEPHEN F. HAYESMark 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.
Read more... 9:25 AM, Apr 9, 2013 • By GEOFFREY NORMANWhile 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.
Read more... 12:00 AM, Apr 6, 2013 • By IRWIN M. STELZEREnough 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.”
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