Unemployment rates across the G7 illustrate a broad-based labor recovery. Fantastic – now let’s get to the underlying stories. (Note: The US is the first to release the June 2010 figures. All other unemployment rates, except for the UK, are current as of May 2010.) Germany, France, and Italy: Germany’s labor market is ostensibly improving, […]

Andy Harless presents the case for a double dip (second recession) – I would re-order #1 and #2 on that list – and that for a sustained recovery. #6 of Andy’s case for a sustained recovery (he calls it Case Against a Second Dip) caught my attention, pointing me to an earlier Paul Krugman article […]

The Washington Post reports on an interesting development. If people aren’t able to “see” how they personally fit in to the ‘economy’ or ‘carbon footprint’ in a real way, they often ignore the ‘problem’ or keep it so abstract it does not touch them. Three years ago, Dan Yates and Alex Laskey, the co-founders of […]

The Senate voted down the American Workers, State, and Business Relief Act of 2010, 57 to 41 (see an earlier version of the CBO’s estimate here for a breakdown of the Bill). The emergency extensions to weekly unemployment benefits will now expire, leaving many without government support as the labor market improves at snail speed. […]

There was an interesting blog post over at the Macroblog (Atlanta Fed) regarding productivity. John Robertson and Pedro Silos highlight the contributions to GDP growth from various factors, including productivity and employment. One of their findings: As this chart shows, relatively high labor productivity growth during a recession is not a phenomenon isolated to the […]

On the forefront of the Chinese economic releases this week was the trade data, where headlines shouted +48.5% Y/Y export growth in May. This report didn’t go unnoticed in Washington, as renewed obsessions with the Chinese peg against the US dollar fired up again. But the Chinese release overshadowed the Philippines April trade report, which […]

by Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow and Braintruster Marshall Auerback at the New Deal 2.0 For once, Canada is making the news for the wrong reasons. The United Kingdom has braced the country for cuts in government spending up to 20 percent as the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition lays the groundwork for an austerity program to […]

by Rebecca “Go long whatever Chinese consumers buy and go short Chinese capital spending (construction) plays. Consistently, go long tech/short material stocks.” That is the first sentence of a BCA Research report’s executive summary on China equity strategy (link not available). Rather than a global equity strategy, I’d like to put this into an economic […]

Marshall Auerback is a Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow and Braintruster at the New Deal 2.0. By Marshall Auerback To paraphrase Shakespeare, things are indeed rotten in the State of Denmark (and Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and almost everywhere else in the euro zone). An entire continent appears determined to commit collective hara kiri, […]

O.K., Greece is now “high yield”, “junk”, “below investment grade”, at least according to S&P. What I mean by that is S&P now rates Greece’s foreign and local currency sovereign debt at the BB+ level (with a negative outlook), below the sometimes-coveted investment grade status, BBB- is the minimum. Why did S&P feel the need […]