News
Politico | Does President Obama have chops to wrap up his trade deals?
Some presidents have a natural affinity for trade deals, but in the first year of his administration, President Barack Obama seemed to many observers like he couldn’t care less. He appointed a likable Dallas mayor without much experience in the field to be his trade representative and gave him very little negotiating to do.
CNN Money | How sick are Europe's banks? Wait and see
Five years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a lack of confidence in Europe's banks is still acting as a brake on the region's tentative recovery.
Bloomberg | Spain Ends Two-Year Recession Amid Effort to Add Jobs
Spain emerged from a two-year recession in the third quarter, strengthening Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s efforts to repair the nation’s finances and reduce the 26 percent jobless rate.
WSJ | College Tuition Increases Slow, but Government Aid Falls
After decades of rampant growth, the rate of tuition increases at U.S. colleges and universities has slowed for the second academic year in a row, but government aid has fallen, continuing a cycle of rising costs and debt for American students.
Econ Comments & Analysis
Investors | Lackluster Jobs Report Underscores Epic Failure Of Obamanomics
Jobs: Here we go again, another employment report showing "unexpectedly weak" job growth. Pretty soon Americans are going to figure out, as computer geeks like to say, "It's not a bug — it's a feature."
Washington Times | Tempering the allure of alternative fuels
America’s skyrocketing oil and natural-gas output is not only fueling massive and widespread economic growth, but also producing considerable hot air in policy discussions. Most dangerous are illusions of “energy independence” and “energy leverage” that ignore fundamental economic and political realities of the modern world. Blind pursuit of these twin goals is unlikely to bring the results that some claim and could, in fact, have costly unintended consequences, both at home and abroad.
Blogs
Economist | The housing wedge
The rub, I suppose, is that housing regulations are not exogenous with respect to the strength of the local economy or the generosity of the welfare state.
Market Watch | Signs of home-price slowdown in latest FHFA data
There were signs of a slowdown in the home-price data released by the Federal Housing Finance Agency on Wednesday.
WSJ | Introducing: China Econtracker 2.0
China’s economy put in a decent performance in the third quarter, with gross domestic product growing 7.8% year-to-year – the best figure of 2013 so far. So why do many economists sound so downbeat?
