Some Good Economic News

What Slowdown?

If the U.S. economy keeps growing like it is, Rodney Dangerfield is going to have to rise from the dead and file a patent claim. The expansion that gets no respect keeps cruising along -- past $70 oil, above rising interest rates, and now apparently around even the housing and auto slumps.

Yesterday's report that fourth quarter GDP rose a healthy 3.5% was merely the most recent repudiation of the media and Beltway bears who have predicted a recession in each of the past four years. The latest scare came last fall, as the decline in housing accelerated and many of Wall Street's Keynesian forecasters predicted the consumer would slump along with it. (We hope someone offered smelling salts to the economists at Goldman Sachs yesterday.)

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The Current 'Depression'

Stagnant wages, the "savings rate" and other non-problems.

Saturday, February 3, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST The good economic news keeps rolling in. Yesterday's new-jobs estimate for January, at 110,000, was below Wall Street expectations but it was accompanied by upward revisions of 81,000 jobs for the prior two months. Those revisions brought the 2006 monthly average up to 187,000 new jobs, or 2.2 million for the year.

Readers will recall that the current expansion was derided right through 2004 as a "jobless recovery." We now know the economy has created 7.4 million new jobs since mid-2003, as revisions by the Bureau of Labor Statistics have added hundreds of thousands to its original monthly estimates. Thus the hand-wringers have had no choice but to move on, turning their laments to allegedly "stagnant wages." Well, that's now vanishing too. ( Read more... )