Recession

Late Sunday evening, the United Auto Workers and General Motors reached a tentative four-year agreement shortly before the union's 11:59 p.m. strike deadline. The agreement was expected, simply because the financial and political blowback of a strike at a company bailed out by taxpayers at a cost running into tens of billion of dollars back in 2009 would have been severe. Also expected: the…

The news coming out of Detroit about near-deadline negotiations between the United Auto Workers union and General Motors has been pretty quiet. As the Sunday 11:59 p.m. deadline approaches, the Associated Press only has a four-paragraph blurb indicating that the union wants to get a richer package than it just garnered in negotiations with Fiat Chrysler. A Reuters report goes into detail about GM…

Hillary Clinton was in Alabama a few days ago. As she has in the past at least two other times when south of the Mason-Dixon line, she decided that she could drop the letter "g" from several of her "i-n-g" words while affecting a sort-of Southern accent. This time she was in Alabama. Mrs. Clinton cut the "g" from the at least the following words she has no trouble fully pronouncing when she's in…

The business press is trying to convince readers, listeners, and viewers that Janet Yellen's Federal Reserve kept interest rates at zero not because of U.S. economic conditions, which supposedly "look good" with "steady economic growth." No-no. She stayed the course because of the troubled tglobal economy. Thursday evening, Reuters wrote that the Fed failed to move "in a bow to worries about the…

From its "Don't read this story, it's boring" headline to its obfuscating content, today's coverage at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, of the Census Bureau's 2014 report on income and poverty in the United States was all about ensuring that readers know as little as possible about the declining incomes and disheartening increases in officially-defined poverty seen during the…

Democrats' current and potential candidates for their party's 2016 presidential nomination continue to complain about various aspects of the economy. They continue to make no connection between their complaints and the fact that Democrat Barack Obama has been in the White House for over six years. Obama has for the most part operated either under the conditions created by the 2009-2010 Congress…

Imagine if, in 1987, a Federal Reserve official could have pointed to a poorly performing economy and said, "Gee, this supply-side economics hasn't worked out very well." The press would surely have treated the story as a front-page item and ensured that it got air time on the Big Three networks' then-dominant nightly news broadcasts. Of course, there was no such credible report, because the…

Several commenters at my econ-related posts during the past several months here at NewsBusters and my home blog have noted how Washington's mix of high deficits, over-regulation, and quantitative easing never seem to get any kind of blame for the economy in establishment press coverage. One could hardly find a better example of that deliberate avoidance than Josh Boak's writeup today at the…

It "seems" that a bit of doubt seeped into an economy-related Associated Press report today. An hour later, it was gone. An early report by Josh Boak with a 10:22 a.m. time stamp found at a subscribing outlet's site described job growth in the past 12 months as "seemingly robust." An hour later, in an expansion of that early report primarily covering today's government release on July retail…

Two wire service dispatches covering the government's June Wholesale Sales and Inventories release either glossed over or completely ignored what others are saying about the report's impact on near-term economic growth. The final sentence of an unbylined Reuters report vaguely referred to future impact by indicating that current inventory balances, which are bloated by historical standards, "…

These economics reporters at the Associated Press have become experts at deadpan humor. Earlier today, I noted how the wire service's Christopher Rugaber told readers, in the wake of a government report showing the lowest wage and benefit increases on record, that "the job market is not yet back to full health." No kidding, Chris. On top of that, the AP's Martin Crutsinger reacted to yesterday's…

The bar-lowering in the business press continues. In the wake of today's disappointing news from the government on U.S. economic growth, an email from CNNMoney.com failed to properly describe reported second-quarter growth, and falsely characterized today's results as "solid":

All the attention given to the decidedly mixed employment report the government issued early Thursday morning and the ongoing debt drama in Greece overshadowed a very disappointing release on factory orders which arrived from the Census Bureau 90 minutes later. In a cursory eight-paragraph report at the Associated Press, Martin Crutsinger relayed the basic bad news, but studiously avoided citing…

There may no better illustration of how much harm the economy has inflicted on the American people during the Obama era than a March 2015 Harris survey commissioned by American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. The AICPA's Thursday press release reported that "a majority of American adults (51 percent) have delayed at least one important life decision in the last year due to financial…