News
CNN Money | Debit cards: $50 spending limit coming?
Declined! Your debit card may soon be denied for purchases greater than $100 -- or even as little as $50.
Reuters | Gasoline cost to jump $700 for average household
The average U.S. household will spend about $700 more for gasoline in 2011 than it spent last year, bringing total motor fuel expenses up 28 percent to $3,235, based on an annual pump price of $3.61 a gallon, the department's Energy Information Administration said.
CNN Money | U.S. gas prices are a joke ... in Norway
While Americans tear their hair out at the pump, Europeans watch them enviously from across the Atlantic.
Bloomberg | Pimco’s Gross Eliminates Government Debt From Total Return Fund
Bill Gross, who runs the world’s biggest bond fund at Pacific Investment Management Co., eliminated government-related debt from his flagship fund last month as the U.S. projected record budget deficits.
CNN Money | Is China's economy slowing too fast?
It's starting to look as if everybody's worst fears about China's economy may finally be coming true. China is slowing down.
Yahoo Finance | January trade deficit jumps to $46.3 billion
Trade deficit widens to $46.3 billion in Jan.; foreign cars, oil prices cause imports to surge
CNN Money | Foreclosures plunge 27% - biggest drop on record
Is our long national foreclosure nightmare ending?
Econ Comments
RCM | Wisconsin Provides a National Model
After three weeks of demonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, a newly-elected Republican, will soon be able to sign a bill limiting public sector collective bargaining and raising public employees' health and pension contributions. This could be a model for other financially-strapped states to follow.
Ludwig von Mises Institute | Accounting for the Unaccountable: The Case of Externalities
This article demonstrates that, even if one accepts this ethical principle, the usual choice of externality-generating actions that are believed to justify state intervention is purely arbitrary.
Blogs
Zero Hedge | US Trade Deficit Surges To $46.3 Billion On Expectations Of $41.5 Billion: Downard GDP Revisions Coming
And another piece of bad news for both the US economy and US exporters in particular, even despite prevailing dollar weakness over the past several months: the January US trade deficit printed at $46.3 billion, on imports of $214.1 billion ($10.5 billion higher M/M) and exports of $167.7 billion ($4.4 billion higher). This was the worst number since August 2010.
Mercatus Center: Neighborhood Effects | Pension accounting narratives
The controversy over just how expensive public pension plans are, and are likely to be, is growing more contentious. The reason is that some defenders of the current system cavalierly dispense with insights of financial economics in favor of a story that unravels on closer inspection.
Zero Hedge | Chinese February Trade Surplus Drops So Much It Becomes Deficit, Largest In 7 Years
After China was expected to post a $4.9 billion February trade surplus, the centrally planned economy demonstrated just how easy it is to shut all CNY "undervaluation" critics up, by posting a miraculous $7.3 billion trade DEFICIT in February, which just happened to be the largest in 7 years, following January's surging surplus.
Cato@Liberty | A Happy Birthday to The Wealth of Nations
Today marks the 235th anniversary of Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, otherwise known as The Wealth of Nations. I chatted with GMU economics professor Russ Roberts on the book and its enduring impact.
Ludwig von Mises Institute | Free Market Critique of LBJ’s Great Society
Much of the current budgetary and related debt crisis confronting the United States has its origin in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs of the 1960s. Many of these supposedly “untouchable” entitlement programs that are at the core of the fiscal conflicts going on right now in Washington, D.C. and in the state capitals around the country were created or were greatly expanded in the Great Society era.
Reports
RCM: Wells Fargo | Economics Group
Monthly Outlook
