Crash Survival Zone

Can Obama’s supporters save him from his economic advisers?
By Robert Kuttner
…The past weeks have seen efforts to seize on every shred of good (or not as bad as expected) economic news. The commercial paper market is loosening up! Some new homeowners are getting bargains! The economy only lost 539,000 jobs in April instead of the [...]

Medicare and Social Security are in terrible shape. Unfortunately, private-sector health and pension plans are doing even worse.
By Daniel Gross
Unlike my colleague Robert Samuelson, I’m not too worried about the impending bankruptcy of Medicare and Social Security, the government-run programs designed to provide health care and pensions to Americans. The two programs, he notes, will [...]

… what if our hope for recovery stands on false assumptions? Economists tend to imagine the economy as taking place between production and consumption. But there is a larger economy of which ours is only a subset. Why then do we only speak about the economy in terms of growth? Because our history reinforces the [...]

A higher U.S. minimum wage is providing a cushion to the economy when it is most needed, according to a report released on Thursday.

The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think-tank based in Washington, said recent rises in the minimum wage have acted as a “stealth stimulus,” preventing the worst recession in generations from spiraling out [...]

The figures are staggering. Unemployment at 8.9 percent. Record new unemployment claims. By one measure, unemployment and underemployment at 15.6 percent.

Hardworking families are struggling to get by, and too often, they don’t know where to turn for help.

That’s where the Unemployment LifeLine comes in. It’s a one-stop guide that links workers to the resources in [...]

By Paul Krugman

Suddenly it seems as if everyone is talking about inflation. Stern opinion pieces warn that hyperinflation is just around the corner. And markets may be heeding these warnings: Interest rates on long-term government bonds are up, with fear of future inflation one possible reason for the interest-rate spike.

But does the big inflation scare [...]

In times of economic crisis, Americans turn to their families for support. If the Great Depression is any guide, we may see a drop in our sky-high divorce rate. But this won’t necessarily represent an increase in happy marriages, nor is the trend likely to last. In the long run, the Depression weakened American families, [...]

The U.S. dollar spiked when the economic crisis was peaking, and it’s falling now that a recovery’s in sight. What gives?

The relationship between the country’s economy and its currency, it turns out, is more complicated now than ever as the government assumes a larger role in propping up the financial system and encouraging economic growth.

Here [...]

Leaders in both Washington and Beijing have been fretting openly about the mutual dependence — some would say codependence — created by China’s vast holdings of United States bonds. But beyond the talk, the relationship is already changing with surprising speed.

China is growing more picky about which American debt it is willing to finance, and [...]

By Joseph Marr Cronin and Howard E. Horton

The public has become all too aware of the term “bubble” to describe an asset that is irrationally and artificially overvalued and cannot be sustained. The dot-com bubble burst by 2000. More recently the overextended housing market collapsed, helping to trigger a credit meltdown. The stock market has [...]