U.S. consumers' mood edges up in March

The trade deficit narrowed, but apparently because we're buying less of other nation's stuff, not because other nations are buying more of our stuff.

Faint signs of economic life lift stock market.

A lot of these signs count less as "good news" than "not as bad as we expected news." The Tuesday rally was kind of the same.

Even in a recession, some companies are hiring.

"An average of nearly five people are competing for each opening. That's up sharply from a ratio of less than 2-to-1 in December 2007, when the recession was just starting."

Consumer borrowing rose unexpectedly in January

I think, like the uptick in January spending, this is considered a good sign of economic activity or banks' willingness to loan. But sometimes I can't tell the 'up' indicators from the 'down' ones.

Here's a nice, three-minute segment from The Daily Show about whether the Dow "dislikes" Obama:

A David Brooks column that lays out the spending-control priorities of the Obama Administration, beyond this year's budget: When Obamatons Respond. Forward to your conservative friends.

Layoffs mount, but media sector hardly worst off

Hardly cause to celebrate, but...

New jobless claims unexpectedly drop to 639K

Consumer spending, personal income, savings rate all rise in January. (The Dow will still probably tank today because of AIG.)

Something we're told about this recession is that consumers should spend more, not save more, to improve economic activity. But if they save more, doesn't that give the beleagured banks more capital? So why doesn't that " ( Read more... )

This piece from the New Yorker explains that during this recession wages and overall worker productivity have been relatively high:

"Productivity-how much output workers produce per hour of work-is the key to a healthy economy. Historically, productivity has been “procyclical”: it rose during booms and fell during recessions. But not this time. ( Read more... )

Not many silver linings in the economic news this week. In fact, it seemed like at least two or three times this week I saw stories that said "Experts predict modest gains in such-and-such economic report to be released tomorrow," followed a few hours later by "Such-and-such economic report reveals numbers FAR WORSE than expected." It would be ( Read more... )