Economy

Liberals sometimes say that law enforcement’s approach to the Mafia offers a model for how to deal with jihadists, even though the latter tend not to limit their demands to protection money. This past Sunday, Egberto Willies claimed that if terrorist attacks were “treated as they should be, like organized crime, it would neuter ISIS. After all…the group is no more powerful than a large band of…

Gosh, this gets tiresome. Once again, with one noteworthy exception, the business press's virtually blind acceptance of seasonally adjusted economic data, and its accompanying refusal to look at the underlying raw data, led it to paint a deceptive picture of an important element of the economy. This time, it was existing home sales for October. The seasonally adjusted annual rate for October…

The press's reluctance to relay Obamacare-related bad news has been obvious for years. Nowhere is this more consistently the case than at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press. Over half of the state non-profit co-ops set up under Obamacare with $2 billion-plus in taxayer funding are failing. The AP has generally treated those failures as local stories, even though they relate to…

Teasing an upcoming report that amounted to Obama administration propaganda on Thursday’s NBC Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie proclaimed: “Fighting for family leave....How one mom's courageous battle for more time at home made it all the way to the White House.”  

The catalog of wishful thinking technically classified as reports on the economy emanating from the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, grows with virtually each passing business day. One of yesterday's additions to the mountainous pile came from the AP's Christopher Rugaber. Tasked with covering the Federal Reserve's report on October's industrial production, he devoted 10 of his…

Japan's two-decade romance with Keynesian economics has led to another betrayal — and yet the press and all the supposedly smart economists and analysts seem to believe that just one more fling might bring about a different result. The Land of the Rising Sun, aka the Land of the Two-Decade Zombie Economy, has just reported an annualized contraction of 0.8 percent in the third quarter. The…

The federal government kicked off fiscal 2016 yesterday by reporting that its October deficit was $136.5 billion, 12 percent higher than the $121.7 billion shortfall seen in October 2014. Single-month comparisons can be tricky because of timing differences, but the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger noted that analyzing the results from this October and last October is an apples-to-apples…

The "fact-checking" press has become a parody of itself during the past several years. It's not only because of their irritating penchant for putting statements by Republicans and conservatives under a twisted microscope while ignoring drop-dead obvious falsehoods delivered by Democrats and leftists. It's because, among other things, the fact-checkers often admit that a statement is true, but…

Tuesday evening, Associated Press economics writers Christopher Rugaber and Josh Boak attempted to "fact check" statements made by candidates at the just-completed Republican presidential debate. Claiming that "The fourth Republican presidential debate was thick on economic policy — and with that came a variety of flubs and funny numbers," the two writers botched at least half of the six points…

Just prior to Tuesday’s main Republican presidential debate on the Fox Business Network, Kelly File host Meygn Kelly panned the moderators from October 28's CNBC debate and predicted that she’s “hoping that we are going to hear what we thought we are going to hear in the last debate, which is, you know, a robust, substantive exchange over one of the most important topics to the voters which is…

You'd think that back in April when, as Ken Shepherd noted, Chris Matthews talked about Blockbuster being about all that's left in Rust Belt towns, one of his assistants would have gently taken him aside and explained that Blockbuster shuttered its stores some time ago. But on this evening's Hardball, there was Chris committing the exact same gaffe.  And in the very next segment, Matthews…

Today's "I'm just making stuff up on the fly" award nominee is Martin Crutsinger at the Associated Press. The AP reporter, named by National Review's Kevin Williamson as America's "Worst Economics Writer" in 2013, lived down to his designation in a Tuesday report on the Census Bureau's September Monthly Trade Inventories and Sales release. He described a sales increase which didn't come close to…

Morning Joe Tuesday featured a discussion with Bill Nye, known as the Science Guy from his television days, and his new book, “Unstoppable.” The book is about getting America to lead on fighting Climate Change, particularly in transitioning from fossil fuels to wind and solar energy. Scarborough on Climate Change, threw to Nye, about the signficance of China and other developing countries on…

Even Joe Scarborough, who according to the National Review's Elaina Plott has a "vehement" dislike of Marco Rubio, thinks there's nothing to the Florida Republican Senator's credit card issue.