News
Bloomberg |
Consumer Comfort in U.S. Declines for a Second Straight Week
The Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index dropped to minus 34.4 in the week ended March 24, a six-week low, from minus 33.9 in the prior period.
Market Watch | 30-year mortgage rate rises to 3.57%
The average rate on the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rose to 3.57% in the week ending March 28, still near record a low, from 3.54% in the prior week, Freddie Mac said Thursday in its weekly report.
Bloomberg | Economy in U.S. Grew at Revised 0.4% Pace in Fourth Quarter
Gross domestic product rose at a 0.4 percent annual rate, up from a 0.1 percent prior estimate and following a 3.1 percent pace in the third quarter.
Econ Comments & Analysis
WSJ | Laffer and Moore: The Red-State Path to Prosperity
Blue states with high taxes are struggling to compete for businesses and workers.
Washington Times | GHEI: Punishing savers, Cypriot edition
There is a deal in place that will bail out the government of Cyprus — but only after extracting more than $5 billion from bank depositors and plunging the economy into uncertainty.
Market Watch | Top 10 economic policy mistakes
A batch of blunders made by economic and financial authorities both here and abroad has created headwinds that are slowing the already-weak economy. Here are some of their more egregious errors:
Washington Post | ‘Trickle-down consumption’: How rising inequality can leave everyone worse off
As income inequality in the United States has soared and median wages have flatlined since 1980, economists have spent a lot of time debating why the top 1 percent have done so much better than everyone else. Is policy to blame? The decline of labor? Technology?
NBER | Are Government Spending Multipliers Greater During Periods of Slack? Evidence from 20th Century Historical Data
We find no evidence that multipliers are greater during periods of high unemployment in the U.S. In every case, the estimated multipliers are below unity. We do find some evidence of higher multipliers during periods of slack in Canada, with some multipliers above unity.
Blogs
WSJ: Real Time Economics | Most Cities Saw Improving Economic Conditions in 2012
Overall, Texans enjoyed the most gains in economic recovery, according to the data, although that’s partly because the oil and natural gas boom helped insulate the state from the worst of the slowdown.
Mercatus Center | Third Edition of Freedom in the 50 States
Today the Mercatus Center released the third edition of Freedom in the 50 States by Will Ruger and Jason Sorens. In this new edition, the authors score states on over 200 policy variables. Additionally, they have collected data from 2001 to measure how states’ freedom rankings have changed over the past decade.
