News
Washington Times | U.S. service firms grow at fastest pace in 6 months
U.S. service companies grew in September at the fastest pace in six months, helped by a sharp increase in customer demand.
Bloomberg | Consumer Comfort in U.S. Advanced for a Sixth Consecutive Week
Consumer confidence in the U.S. climbed for a sixth straight week, the longest upswing since the end of 2005 into early 2006, as Americans grew more secure about their finances.
FOX Business | U.S. Factory Orders Take Biggest Tumble Since '09
Demand for U.S. factory goods in August fell by the most since January 2009, but the second straight month of gains in orders outside transportation hinted at a less rapid loss of momentum in manufacturing activity.
Market Watch | Fewer foreclosures in August: CoreLogic
There were about 57,000 completed foreclosures in August, down from about 75,000 in the same month last year, according to CoreLogic Thursday.
Washington Times | Mortgage refinancings surge amid record-low rates
The Federal Reserve touched off the biggest mortgage refinancing wave since 2009 last month by driving the interest rates on 30-year mortgages to record lows near 3.5 percent
CNN Money | Facebook reaches one billion users
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday that his social media site had hit the milestone.
Market Watch | Consumer loan delinquencies up in eight categories
Delinquency rates for consumer loans rose in eight loan categories tracked by the American Bankers Association in the second quarter of 2012 including home-equity loans and personal loans, according to a report released Thursday by the ABA.
Econ Comments & Analysis
Washington Times | American Airlines pilots union sabotage
In recent decades, labor union leaders often have sowed the seeds of their own demise by overplaying their hand and overestimating their dominion.
Real Clear Markets | Adios Espana! The Talent Outflow From Spain
Spain appears to be ever closer to asking for outside financial aid to help it recover from a deep recession and cope with severe unemployment. The interest rate Spain must pay to finance its steep budget deficits remains too high to permit a sustainable economic recovery.
WSJ | Why Dodd-Frank Rules Keep Losing in Court
Since the mid-2000s, regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission have been challenged six times in the federal court of appeals in Washington, D.C. The SEC lost every time. I brought four of those lawsuits, and sometimes am asked why the agency has such difficulty defending its rules.
National Review | Unleash the Mind
America’s wealth is not an inventory of goods; it is an organic entity, a fragile pulsing fabric of ideas, expectations, loyalties, moral commitments, visions. To vivisect it for redistribution is to kill it.
CNN Money | What we got for $50 billion in 'green' stimulus
Over 770,000 homes weatherized. A doubling of energy from wind and solar. Cleaning 688 square miles of land formerly used for Cold War-era nuclear testing.
Four Percent Growth | The ‘Mother May I?’ State
The economic costs of TSA have been the subject of endless analyses. We know that nearly 70,000 people are employed to staff airport security checkpoints and that this largely inefficient effort to stop hi-jacking accounts for roughly 4% of the federal personnel budget.
Blogs
Political Calculations | Forecasting GDP for 2012-Q3
Now that the U.S. Bureau of Economic Statistics has published its third and final, for now, estimate of GDP for the second quarter of 2012, we can use our "modified limo" forecasting technique to project approximately where GDP will be recorded for the third quarter of 2012!
