Crash Survival Zone

…The pace of job losses may be slowing — the government reported yesterday that employers shed a net 345,000 jobs in May, far less than economists had expected — but for Thomas and other U.S. workers, things feel like they’re still getting worse. The unemployment rate is now at 9.4 percent, and a record 27 [...]

by Amitai Etzioni

Much of the debate over how to address the economic crisis has focused on a single word: regulation. And it’s easy to understand why. Bad behavior by a variety of businesses landed us in this mess–so it seems rather obvious that the way to avoid future economic meltdowns is to create, and vigorously [...]

Don’t get too excited about signs of life in the economy. Some days it seems there’s good news everywhere: home sales ticking up, slower job losses, the Dow turning positive for the year. But all that misses a looming reality. American consumers, whose overspending largely got us into this mess, are still under massive pressure, [...]

At the start of the recession in December 2007, there were 4.4 million job openings, but that number has declined dramatically. This morning’s data release by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that in April job openings declined 102,000 to 2.5 million, a drop of over 42% since the start of the recession.

The decline in [...]

Why being a macroeconomist means never having to say you’re sorry
By Steve Chapman
President Obama and his critics have a major disagreement. He says his accelerated economic stimulus efforts will create 600,000 jobs by the end of the summer. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, however, doubts “the spending binge we’re on is going to [...]

Strong buying by China has helped lift commodity prices around the world this spring, but growing evidence suggests that a sizable portion of this buying has been to build stockpiles in China, and may not be sustainable.

At least 90 large freighters full of iron ore are idling off Chinese ports, where they face waits of [...]

By Peter Boone and Simon Johnson

Ben Bernanke gave a great speech in 2002, mapping out exactly what the Fed should do if the United States faced a deflationary price spiral — falling wages and prices — that could wreak havoc on the economy. He outlined a series of steps: starting with lowering short-term interest rates [...]

For some months now, Jeremy Grantham, a respected market strategist with GMO, an institutional asset management company, has been railing about — of all things — the efficient market hypothesis.
You know what the efficient market hypothesis is, don’t you? It’s a theory that grew out of the University of Chicago’s finance department, and long held [...]

Underscoring the risk that hopes for a quick turnaround may be premature, the World Bank said Thursday that it expected the global economy to shrink nearly 3 percent in 2009, far deeper than the 1.7 percent contraction it predicted slightly more than two months ago.

Although the bank said that it expected growth in developed countries [...]

Whether at a fund-raising dinner for wealthy supporters in Beverly Hills, or at an Air Force base in Nevada, or at Charlie Rose’s table in New York City, President Obama is conducting an all-out campaign to try to make us feel a whole lot better about the economy as quickly as possible. “It’s safe to [...]