Cheerleading

I am tired of the cheerleading by the mainstream press where they see every positive sign as a sure sign of recovery and every negative sign as “unexpected.” Every article I read on new data from the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg is the same–with mind numbing regularity. Worse is that they always find some economist to give them a positive quote to the effect that we are “turning the corner” or “the recovery is self-sustaining.”

Here are some examples from recent news. These aren’t cherry-picked:

Initial jobless claims rose by 18,000 for the latest reporting week of April 3, up to 460,000.

WSJ: ” jobless benefits rose unexpectedly last week.”

Bloomberg: “More Americans unexpectedly filed claims for jobless benefits …” They like to get someone who is bucking the report to make us feel better and it’s either Home Depot or Caterpillar: “Home Depot Inc., the largest U.S. home-improvement retailer, is adding store jobs for the first time in four years as it expects a rebound in sales, Chief Executive Officer Frank Blake said.”

More on the unemployment situation later. … Continue reading Cheerleading By The Media

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The Third Quarter Bump

By Jeff Harding

It isn’t as if taking your money and giving it to other people to buy new cars doesn’t create sales, it obviously did and I would expect that we’ll see an upward tick in GDP for Q3 as a result.

Almost every investment house is revising upward their predictions on Q3 [...]

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The Problem With Economic Forecasts

By Jeff Harding

Professional economists are really confused by the recent data. As I have noted, what professional economists do is make a forecast by taking a statistic and run a trend line based on it. They take data from the US government (Departments of Commerce and Labor, Census, the Fed) as well as [...]

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Good News vs. Bad News: Which Do You Want To Believe?

The Daily Capitalist Predicts the Future ……

By Jeff Harding……..

There is an endless supply of bad news I could report but most of you who follow the daily news know much of that. I have occasionally been accused of ignoring the good news and placing an unfair emphasis on the bad news [...]

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