Earn What You Spend

Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the unemployment rate has now hit 8.5% -  so far in this recession the economy has shed over 5.1 million jobs.  We all have friends, family and colleagues who are affected by these job losses.  It’s an incredibly tough thing to watch. 
The standard saying is that [...]

[via Greg Mankiw]
Christina Romer, current Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, presented this talk today at the Brookings Institute.  Although the adjective ‘Great’ is returning to our lexicon when describing the current crisis - Ms. Romer assures us that no, we’re not in another Great Depression.  The Great Recession, perhaps, but we are a [...]

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the payroll report for February: 651,000 job losses in February, bringing the unemployment rate to 8.1%.  According to the Bureau, the job losses cut across virtually every sector of the economy:
The number of unemployed persons increased by 851,000 to 12.5 million in
February, and the unemployment rate rose to 8.1 [...]

Black Friday turned out to be more successful than most had thought - retail sales had jumped 3% from the year before.  Anything that shows growth instead of a contraction can surely be counted a success. 
But is it enough to save retail this quarter? It doesn’t look like it.  According to new data released by MasterCard SpendingPulse, [...]

The news, of course, is that we are officially in a recession.  Oh, and the major market indices dropped around 8% yesterday.  
The recession should come as no surprise - we’ve been talking about this for months now.  But a little known board, the National Bureau of Economic Research, is officially in charge of calling a recession [...]

From the Washington Post today:
The stock market fell another 5 percent, as measured by the Dow Jones industrial average, which closed below 8,000 for the first time in this bear market. New-home starts in October were the lowest since at least 1959, when the government began keeping data. The consumer price index plummeted by the [...]