News
FOX News | Dem lawmakers worry California’s cap-and-trade expansion will drive up gas prices
A group of California Democrats is having second thoughts about the state's expanding cap-and-trade program, urging Gov. Jerry Brown's administration to rethink the plan out of concern that it will drive up gas prices and hurt low-income residents.
Market Watch | Chicago PMI retreats in June
Chicago PMI retreated in June after hitting a seven-month high in May, according to the Chicago business barometer released Monday .
Bloomberg | Slowing China Economy Dims Profit Outlook to 2012 Low
The most-actively traded Chinese companies in the U.S. are on pace to report the smallest profits in two years as growth in the world’s second-largest economy decelerates to the slowest since 1990.
Market Watch | Pending home sales highest in eight months
A gauge of pending home sales jumped 6.1% in May to reach the highest level in eight months, signaling that upcoming closings of existing homes are likely to speed up, the National Association of Realtors reported Monday.
Econ Comments & Analysis
Washington Times | Shrinking economy, fading hope
Stagnation is not an appealing campaign promise. The Democrats dare not ask, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” They dare not even ask whether Americans are better off than even four months ago. New statistics reveal that the economy just shrank another 3 percent.
WSJ | A Recovery Stymied by Redistribution
Why has the labor market contracted so much and why does it remain depressed? Major subsidies and regulations intended to help the poor and unemployed were changed in more than a dozen ways—and although these policies were advertised as employment-expanding, the fact is that they reduced incentives for people to work and for businesses to hire.
Real Clear Markets | The Sharing Economy Has 'Mad Men' Scared to Death
The Internet turned 25 this year. It came of age along with the Millennials, the first generation to live and breath in social media. The impacts from both are still rolling through and roiling the culture and the economy.
Forbes | "Room To Grow" Blind To The Most Important Issue For The Middle Class -- Economic Growth
In 1900, we had no airplanes, no computers, no cellphones, no internet. We had only rudimentary versions of cars, trucks, telephones, even cameras. As Stephen Moore and Julian L. Simon report in their underappreciated work, It’s Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years,
CNN Money | Should happiness, more than GDP, define a nation's success?
The tiny nation of Bhutan started measuring "gross national happiness" in the 1970s. More recently, public experts have started to tout the importance of measuring citizens' well-being in addition to GDP.
AEI | Conservatives against corporate welfare: It's time to put this agency out of its misery
After eight decades, the future of the Export-Import Bank is today uncertain. Its charter expires in late September and needs to be renewed by Congress if it is to live on. It shouldn't. It's time to pull the plug on the bank.
Blogs
WSJ | Fed’s Bullard: Markets Right to Play Down Gloomy GDP Report
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard said markets are correct in looking past the “shockingly negative” estimate of first-quarter economic growth reported this past week amid other signs that the economy is improving.
CATO | The Coming School Choice Tidal Wave
Last week I reviewed the latest survey on education policy from the Friedman Foundation but I missed something that should warm the cockles of the hearts of everyone who supports greater choice in education: each generation is progressively more favorable and less opposed to educational choice.
Library of Economics | When is nominal GDP targeting optimal?
There are good reasons to think that NGDP targeting is better suited to emerging and developing economies than to industrialized countries. These economies are more frequently subject to adverse terms-of-trade shocks, such as increases in world oil prices or declines in prices for their commodity exports. Their economies also tend to suffer larger supply shocks from natural disasters, other weather events, social unrest, and unexpected productivity changes.
