News
CNN Money | GM made $22.6 billion. We lost $10.6 billion
GM has earned a stunning $22.6 billion since the dark days of the financial crisis, when the automaker was bailed out by the U.S. government. Taxpayers didn't fare nearly as well. They'd lost $10.6 billion by the time the U.S. Treasury department closed the books on the $49.5 billion bailout in December.
Bloomberg | Consumer Comfort in U.S. Falls to Lowest Level Since November
Consumer confidence declined last week to the lowest level since November as Americans’ views of their finances and the buying climate weakened.
CNN Money | U.S. economy shrinks, but it's not a big deal
Revised numbers released Thursday show the economy shrank in the first quarter, marking the first downturn since early 2011. Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic growth, fell at a 1% annual pace, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Bloomberg | Pending Sales of U.S. Existing Homes Increased 0.4% in April
Contracts to purchase previously owned homes rose for a second month in April, a sign the residential real estate market is stabilizing after a weak start to the year.
CNN Money | America's growing housing affordability gap
For the typical American household earning the median income, 65.5% of homes were affordable during the first quarter, according to a survey by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and Wells Fargo Bank's Housing Affordability Index.
Econ Comments & Analysis
Barrons | Is the Stock Market Behaving Like It's 2007?
It's May 2014. And according to some interesting analysis by Pension Partners, a New York-based investment advisor, the market conditions are eerily similar to May 2007, five months before the end of the last long-running bull market.
WSJ | Book Review: 'House of Debt' by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi
Success has many parents, it is said, but failure is an orphan. Not so the crash of 2008. Trade imbalances, low interest rates, reckless banks, lax regulation, pliable bond-rating agencies, the government's encouragement of borrowing and home buying—all played a role in the financial crisis and the recession that followed.
Politico | On Energy, ‘All of the Above’ Is Working
It may come as a surprise, but the world leader in combined oil and natural gas production last year was not Saudi Arabia, despite its vast reserves. Nor was it Russia with its natural gas giant Gazprom. Rather, for the third year in a row, these countries were surpassed by the United States.
WSJ | European Markets at Risk from 'Fickle' Capital Inflows, ECB Says
The European Central Bank warned that the main risk for European financial markets is a reversal of potentially "fickle" capital inflows into the euro zone, a factor that has benefited banks and governments in recent months by lowering borrowing costs.
Mercatus | Evaluating Regulatory Reforms: Lessons for Future Reforms
Whether they think that agencies regulate too much or not enough, critics from widely differing perspectives agree that rulemaking is all too often hijacked by special interests. Some critics claim that federal agencies are influenced too much by calls for new regulation from various activist groups. Others argue that powerful industry lobbies often derail necessary regulation and leave people exposed to environmental harms and unsafe products.
Blogs
WSJ | Contracting GDP Is Rare Outside of Recessions
The U.S. economy contracted at a 1% seasonally adjusted annual pace in the first three months of the year, the Commerce Department said Thursday, marking only the second time since the recession that output declined during a quarter.
WSJ | Gas Prices and Global Consumption
Cheap gas makes people use too much of it — that’s the takeaway from a study in this month’s American Economic Review. In “The Economic Cost of Global Fuel Subsidies,” Lucas Davis, a associate professor at Berkeley’s Haas Business School, uses World Bank data to show that countries with consumer fuel subsides have higher fuel consumption.
