Crash Survival Zone

More Americans will lose their health insurance as the economy weakens, health care becomes more expensive and fewer employers offer coverage, the U.S. Institute of Medicine said in a report on Tuesday.

The institute, an independent research organization that advises U.S. policymakers, said safety-net services such as charity care and hospital emergency rooms cannot be relied [...]

As recession-wary Americans adapt to a new frugality, Japan offers a peek at how thrift can take lasting hold of a consumer society, to disastrous effect.

The economic malaise that plagued Japan from the 1990s until the early 2000s brought stunted wages and depressed stock prices, turning free-spending consumers into misers and making them dead weight [...]

by Paul Krugman’
Comrade Greenspan wants us to seize the economy’s commanding heights.

O.K., not exactly. What Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman — and a staunch defender of free markets — actually said was, “It may be necessary to temporarily nationalize some banks in order to facilitate a swift and orderly restructuring.” I agree.

The case [...]

U.S. home prices plunged at a record pace in December, data showed on Tuesday, while consumer confidence also hit a record low in February as Americans feared an already deep recession was likely to get even worse.

Prices of U.S. single-family homes fell 18.5 percent in December from a year earlier, with the pace of decline [...]

Index of consumer sentiment falls to an all-time low in February and signals more deterioration ahead.
A key measure of consumer sentiment fell more than expected in February, to the lowest level since its 1967 inception, as Americans remained wary of spending amid the weak economy and rising unemployment.
The Conference Board, a New York-based business research [...]

In late October, CNN’s Ali Velshi and Erica Fink looked at five key measures of the economy to see how bad it really was. Now, they look again at the CNN “Real Feel Economic Index” and find it’s tougher still.

As you’ve heard us and others report, the U.S. economy, more so than other worldwide economies, [...]

Federal Reserve chief says full recovery from this recession will take more than two or three years.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said he’s hoping the recession could end later this year, but he cautioned that a full economic recovery will take “more than two or three years.”

The head of the central bank said a turnaround [...]

Yale professor Robert J. Shiller, the author of “Irrational Exuberance,” created one of the most useful and predictive measures of stock-market valuation: the cyclically-adjusted price-earnings ratio (CAPE).

As Professor Shiller explains here, the CAPE mutes the impact of the business cycle by averaging 10 years of earnings. It thus provides a good picture of the market’s [...]

Stimulus spending rivals the New Deal, but the bad news keeps coming

In sheer size, the economic measures announced by President Barack Obama to address “a crisis unlike we’ve ever known” are remarkable, rivaling and in many cases dwarfing the New Deal programs that Franklin D. Roosevelt famously created to battle the Great Depression.

Winning approval was [...]

If new predictions hold true, would be first year-long contraction since 1982
Brace yourself: The recession is projected to worsen this year.

The country stands to lose a sizable chunk of economic activity in 2009 as consumers at home and abroad retrench in the face of persistent economic troubles. And the U.S. unemployment rate — now at [...]