Popular Topics

The Economic Numbers Are Getting Ugly Again - Steven Rattner, NY Times

On its face, Friday’s announcement that the nation’s gross domestic product expanded at a 2.5 percent annual rate in the first quarter was good news, following as it did an onl...

Blame Conservatives for Our Problems - E.J. Dionne, Washington Post

The policy mystery of our time is why politicians in the United States and across much of the democratic world are so obsessed with deficits, when their primary mission ought to ...

Our Cities Are in Danger of Falling Apart - Patrick Sharkey, NY Times

FOR the past several years all the ingredients have been in place for an urban crisis. Unemployment has hovered above 15 percent in many of our most distressed cities. High-pover...

Uncertainty Is Killing the Economy - Bill McNabb, Wall Street Journal

Anyone hoping for signs of a healthy economic recovery was disappointed by lower-than-expected GDP growth for the first quarter of 2013—a mere 2.5%, far short of the forec...

Refereeing the Reinhart-Rogoff Debate - Stevenson & Wolfers , Bloomberg

The discovery of an error in an influential research paper by Harvard University economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff has sparked an academic firestorm. It’s time to...

Millennials Are the Unluckiest Generation - Derek Thompson, The Atlantic

Sorry, Housing Won't Rescue the Economy - Josh Bivens, EPI

I noted a while back that the uptick in residential construction was a genuine bright spot in the economy, and one that would all else equal make one expect better GDP growth in ...

The Recession Wasn't Bush's Fault - James Pethokoukis, AEI

The librarians at the new George W. Bush presidential center should buy this book on Amazon: The Great Recession: Market Failure or Policy Failure by Robert Hetzel. The author, a R...

Congress Doesn't Care About Our Biggest Problem - Niraj Chokshi, NJ

 It stands to reason that lawmakers who often decry the high jobless rate would want to be seen publicly trying to tackle the problem, right? Well, apparently not....

A Recession for the 93%, Good Times for the 7% - Mijin Cha, Policy Shop

 As we struggle to fully recover from the Great Recession, it has become increasingly clear that the wealthy not only recovered much more quickly than the rest of the countr...

U.S.'s Low Labor Participation: Now the Really Bad News - JT Young, RCM

 America's jobs figures reveal more than high unemployment, they show a declining productive capacity. Job loss remains a major U.S. problem, but the loss of productive ca...

Can Obama Bring Back Good Jobs? - Thomas Edsall, New York Times

Among those paying serious attention to the economic dilemmas facing the United States and other advanced nations, uncertainty is the only constant....

The Falling Startup Rate Could Be a Good Sign - Bell-Masterson, Forbes

Since before the dawn of the Great Recession, economists have recognized the value of entrepreneurship to the health of the U.S. economy. Indeed, a Kauffman-funded Census report ...

Austerity After Reinhart and Rogoff - Pollin & Ash, Financial Times

A main policy plank is riddled with faults, write Robert Pollin and Michael Ash...

Why Women Are Fleeing the Workforce - Liz Peek, The Fiscal Times

Lean in, lean back, stand up, sit down – everyone has advice for women wanting to get ahead. How about: Get a job?...

The Push for Austerity Hits an Excel Snag - Matthew O'Brien, The Atlantic

The austerians' foundational text lost a battle with Excel -- and reality...

The Economic Harm of the Breakdown of Marriage - R. Samuelson, WashPo

The discouraging March employment report, with a job increase of only 88,000, raises questions well beyond the dreary state of today’s labor market. Prolonged high unemployment ...

What Progressives Must Do to End U.S. Malaise - Will Marshall, PPI

Do's and Don'ts for Shared Prosperity - Lane Kenworthy, Policy Network

Many of the rich countries, when they return to reasonably robust economic growth, will face two potential obstacles to shared prosperity. One is a shortage of jobs. The other is...

Carmen Reinhart: The Crisis Isn't Over - Der Spiegel

In a SPIEGEL interview, Harvard economist Carmen Reinhart argues governments are incapable of reducing their debts and that central banks are now stepping up to resolve the crisi...

Follow Germany's Lead to Get People Working - Charles Lane, Wash. Post

Germans generally like Barack Obama — 89 percent favored him over Republican Mitt Romney in 2012, according to a Pew Research Center survey. And he admires Germany bac...

Let the Punishment Fit the Economic Crime - Mark Thoma, Fiscal Times

As Paul Krugman observed recently, “the urge to see depression as a necessary and somehow even desirable punishment for past sins, while inveighing against any attempt to ...

Blame DC for Our Employment Woes - James Pethokoukis, National Review

Who lost the American worker? If the anemic employment recovery since the Great Recession’s end doesn’t prompt that question, perhaps the painful March jobs report finally w...

New Orleans' Mayor Landrieu on the City's Resurgence - National Journal

NEW ORLEANS—Things are looking up for this city. Partly, that’s because anything is an improvement over the post-Katrina hellscape. But from tragedy arose opportunit...

Aging Baby Boomers Don't Explain Bad Jobs Report - M. Klein, Bloomberg

 Today's U.S. jobs report is an unpleasant reminder that the recovery has yet to gain much traction. There are some bullish indicators buried in the details, such as the plu...

The Fries-With-That-Economy - Catherine Rampell, Economix

One of the more striking patterns in the recovery has been the fast clip of low-wage job growth. The best example of this is probably in food services and drinking places, which ...

David Stockman's Outlandish Economic Ideas - Robert Hockett, Salon

Former budget director David Stockman makes outlandish calls for a divorce from the market and the state...

To Create Jobs, U.S. Must Spend - Dimitri Papadimitriou, Los Angeles Times

Just before the congressional spring break, a Senate budget proposal to decrease, but not eliminate, the deficit over 10 years was denounced as "pro debt" by an Alabama senator. ...

The Food Stamp Recovery Is the New Normal - Ed Morrissey, Fiscal Times

Almost four years ago, in June 2009, the US entered into a technical recovery from the Great Recession touched off by the collapse of a decade-long housing bubble. The bubb...

Our Economy Is Like a Car Stuck in the Snow - T. Taylor, Conversable Econ.

Macroeconomic policy discussions keep reminding me, as a Minnesotan just making it through the winter, of a car stuck in the snow. For the uninitiated, when your car is truly stuck...

'Starve the Beast' Discredited Once Again - Garett Jones, Econlog

In the last few months here in the U.S. we've had a tax increase followed by a sequester.  Tax hikes coupled with slower spending growth: Here on the internet, we ca...

The Jobs Situation Is Still Dire - Mortimer Zuckerman, Wall Street Journal

The Great Recession is an apt name for America's current stagnation, but the present phase might also be called the Grand Illusion—because the happy talk and statistics th...

The Working Class Is Politically Powerless - Mark Thoma, The Fiscal Times

If we want to ensure that our children and grandchildren have the brightest possible future, the national debt is not the most important problem to address. Reversing the polariz...

A Nation of Permanent Freelancers and Temps - Jeremy Neuner, Atlantic

 The debate over telecommuting that Yahoo has spurred raises an important issue, but it’s not simply about workplace flexibility. It begs questions about the fundament...

The Economic Recovery Is Real - Tim Duy, Fed Watch

 A lot of ink has been spilled over the past three years fretting about the fragility of the economy.  But the reality is largely the opposite.  The economy has pr...

Stop Obsessing About Economic Growth - James Poulos, Vice

America’s political elites are always in search of something new to obsess over. Sometimes it’s immigration. Ten years ago, it was weapons of mass destruction in I...

Here's Why U.S. Carbon Emissions Are Down - Eduardo Porter, NY Times

Who would have thought the United States would one day be a leader in cutting greenhouse gas emissions?...

The Economy Is Struggling Under the Burden of the Debt - Economics21

Each quarter, the Federal Reserve publishes the “Flow of Funds” accounts, which provide a summary of the conditions of the consolidated balance sheet of the United States and ...

Signs of Life from the Economy- Don't Sabotage It - Len Burman, Forbes

Finally, the economy is showing strong signs that the six-year slump may be coming to an end.   236,000 people found work in February, far more than economists had expected, a...

Don't Be Fooled by the Jobs Numbers - Dean Baker, The Guardian

We've seen seasonal spikes in jobs before. The underlying story is a weak US economy that will be hurt by sequester cuts...

Jobs Crisis Is About More Than Unemployment - Mathur & Hanson, RCM

President Obama has positioned himself as champion of the middle class. In his State of the Union speech, he declared that it was "our generation's task" to "reignite the true en...

Austerity's Track Record Isn't Good - Martin Wolf, Financial Times

The ECB could have prevented the panic. Tens of millions are now suffering unnecessarily...

If He Doesn't Act, Obama Faces Endless Fiscal Cliffs - Robert Kuttner, TAP

Unless the president compels Congress to change course, the economy faces a future of endless fiscal cliffs....

Create Jobs with Stability, Not the Safety Net - Jason Stverak, RCPolicy

 On Tuesday, President Barack Obama warned of damaging job losses if Congress doesn't act to prevent the sequester....

No More Nostalgia for the 1950s Economy - Scott Winship, Breakthrough

Nostalgia for the boom economic growth years of the 1950s and 1960s is misplaced. Americans of all classes have grown materially richer every decade since. The lower growth rates...