“Macroeconomics” on The Daily Caller

WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of people applying for unemployment benefits plunged last week to the lowest level in nearly three years, continuing a downward trend that suggests hiring could pick up this year. (more)

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan challenged Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s policy of so-called quantitative easing – the printing of new U.S. dollars to buy government debt – and raised concerns that a weakened dollar and inflation could cause the loss of the currency’s global reserve status. (more)

Decades of autocratic government and a lack of free elections are, of course, the main drivers of the political upheaval in Egypt. But did the sinking dollar and skyrocketing food prices trigger the massive unrest now occurring in Egypt — or the greater Arab world for that matter? (more)

Apparently Russia understands basic economics and self-control better than the Obama administration. (more)

The annual predictions derby has started again. I wanted to resist getting into that race this year, but when I went back to see how I did at the beginning of 2010, I was pleasantly surprised. Here are the predictions I made for 2010 in my January 3, 2010 commentary: (more)

The Federal Open Market Committee released its latest statement on the economy and monetary policy on December 14. In it, the Bernanke Fed reaffirmed its commitment to running loose monetary policy in the hopes that it will somehow juice up economic growth and job creation. (more)

For once, top Obama economic advisor Larry Summers got it right. Warning opponents of the big tax-cut deal, Summers told reporters, “Failure to pass this bill in the next couple weeks would materially increase the risk that the economy would stall out and we would have a double-dip recession.” (more)

Stop wasting my time
You know what I want
You know what I need
Or maybe you don’t (more)

WASHINGTON—The U.S. economy added fewer jobs than expected in November and the unemployment rate rose to its highest level since April, indicating the economic recovery remains weak 17 months after the recession ended. (more)

Not since the early 1980s has the nation’s unemployment rate been so grim for so long, a government report due Friday is likely to show. (more)

Beijing has the capacity to control surging prices while keeping economic growth on track, China’s main planning agency said Monday, in the latest effort to quell public anxiety about simmering inflation. (more)

The great Bernanke QE2 debate continues to heat up. In the run-up to the G-20 meetings, China, Russia, Germany, and others are all coming out against the Federal Reserve’s quantitative-easing agenda. They don’t want hot-money excess dollars to flow into their higher-yielding currencies. (more)

Without additional government action to spur hiring, President Obama said Sunday that he fears the U.S. economy could enter a “new normal” in which corporate profits are high but the number of new jobs is too low to reduce the nation’s 9.6 percent unemployment rate to pre-recession levels. (more)

In the late nineteenth century, public health in Chicago was suffering. The city’s industrial waste and sewage from its upstream neighbors was befouling the Chicago River, and a disgusted populace blamed it for outbreaks of typhoid and other forms of pestilence. City leaders, under pressure to “do something,” eventually conceived of an audacious idea: Why not reverse the course of the “stinking river” and send the polluted waters downstream to the Mississippi? As unthinkable as that proposal sounds to modern ears, in those days no one had even conceived of an environmental impact study and upstream towns along the river turned out to be no match for big city political power. The Army Corps of Engineers was engaged to build the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, in what was then the largest earth moving effort in North American history. On January 17, 1900, the locks of the canal were opened and water began to flow from Lake Michigan downstream towards New Orleans. The filth had become someone else’s problem. (more)

On the eve of the midterm elections, a third-quarter GDP report showing a meager 2 percent growth rate is the final nail in the Obama Democrats’ political coffin. (more)

As most of us should know by now (but probably don’t), a country’s gross domestic product (its GDP) consists of its people’s consumption (C), plus their investment (I), plus what their government spends (or does not spend) on their behalf (G), plus their net exports (NE) — exports less imports. Expanding GDP, denoting a growing economy, is deemed to be a good thing; contracting GDP, denoting an economy in recession, a bad one. At the moment, governments in the developed world are struggling to keep the GDP of their countries expanding. But if doing so is such a good thing, why is it proving such a struggle? (more)

China raised interest rates for the first time since emerging from the financial crisis, in a surprise move that highlights the widening gap in the world economy between economically vibrant developing countries and the rich nations trying to fend off stagnation. (more)

A rift has emerged within the Democratic Party between liberal economists, who generally view the 2009 stimulus package as a success and say that Keynesian economics should remain the heart of the party’s economic policy, and elected officials, who in growing numbers have shunned affiliation with the $787 billion effort and are expressing doubts about the effectiveness of fiscal intervention. (more)

BOSTON (Reuters) – Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Friday that high unemployment and low inflation point to a need for a further easing of U.S. monetary policy, but he offered no details on the central bank’s next step. (more)

To understand the nation’s anti-incumbency, look no further than the economy’s anti-recovery, which appears to be reversing former House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s dictum that all politics is local.  Anti-incumbency is threatening to make all politics national. (more)