Wall Street Journal

After the Fed made an "emergency" 75-basis-point rate cut this morning, CNBC's "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer, who has gone from bull market cheerleader to bear market doom and gloomer in the last six months, said it was too little too late. "[T]his is obviously the kind of action I was most fearful of - which is that they would have to go panic and that they would get way behind the curve,"…

The headline "The Economy Sucks" might be something you'd expect to see in Rolling Stone or on Slate.com, but certainly not in a reputable news magazine, right? Yet, the January 21 issue of Newsweek defied expectations by using that for part of a headline for a one-sided, pro-Bill Clinton view of the economy. The article recalled the 1992 "It's the economy, stupid!" campaign as it tore down…

You might disagree with how he slashed the Fed funds rate during times of economic turmoil as Federal Reserve chairman. You might have even disavowed him after showing his coziness with the Clinton administration throughout the 1990s. But after 18 years of public service, you can't deny that Alan Greenspan should have a shot in the private sector. However, despite media accolades through…

A lot of journalists have written off the possibility the economy can avert a recession. However, it isn't conventional wisdom that the economy is heading for a recession outside of the journalism world. Jack Welch, author of "Winning," appeared on MSNBC's January 14 "Morning Joe" to discuss the economy, the presidential race and professional football. Welch told viewers he didn't anticipate…

The Treasury Department released its Monthly Treasury Statement for December this afternoon. Though Uncle Sam did run a surplus last month, the year-to-date figures are alarming: It should be pretty clear that the big news in the above figures is that federal spending during the first quarter of the fiscal year was almost 9% higher than during the first quarter a year ago. If the spending…

The economy is about to dive off a cliff and it's all President George W. Bush's fault, according to The New York Times editorial board. A January 2 Times editorial was pretty pessimistic about the economy in 2008, mocking Bush and forecasting doom. "As 2008 begins, house prices are still skidding, bank losses are still mounting, oil is again flirting with $100 a barrel and consumers are…

The Associated Press's Mark Sherman, as noted by Jim Taranto at Best of the Web, "reports on a pending Supreme Court case in a way that seems to give both sides their due, but in substance does not." Here are the first three paragraphs of Sherman's report (bolds are mine): The dispute over Indiana's voter ID law that is headed to the Supreme Court in January is as much a partisan political drama…

A subscription-only editorial in the Wall Street Journal on Monday propagated a carefully-worded whopper, but at least made a small change to the paper's insufferable 23-year "There Shall Be Open Borders" mantra (bolds are mine): A recent paper by the Immigration Policy Center, an advocacy group, notes that "Numerous studies by independent researchers and government commissions over the past 100…

The media are always trying to find a way to report the bad side of economic news, so it's shouldn't come as a terrible surprise to anyone that they managed to make positive holiday sales growth a bad thing.According to MasterCard SpendingPulse, retail sales were up 3.6 percent during the holiday season - 2.4 percent excluding gas prices. But because it's not as big an increase as recent years…

When Larry Summers suggested in early 2005 that, as paraphrased by Slate's William Saletan, "innate differences between the sexes might help explain why relatively few women become professional scientists or engineers," the outcry was immediate, furious, and went to saturation level virtually overnight. The controversy ultimately led to his resignation a year later as Harvard President. On…

This is up on Drudge at the moment: Yes, the viciousness is being directed at Democrats for not being spendthrift enough. It's too early to tell whether President Bush and congressional Republicans have outmaneuvered the Democratic congressional majority, but it's looking that way. Old Media doesn't like it, and their inability to successfully buck up their side, one bit. In the Washington Post'…

Capitalist democracies around the world should be very concerned about the level of socialism being discussed at the United Nations' climate change meeting in Bali. Not only are international hands being extended to collect funds from countries like the United States in order to help poorer nations deal with a problem that might actually be disappearing since global temperatures peaked in 1998,…

How often in the past couple of years have you heard a climate alarmist refer to a so-called scientific consensus concerning man's role in global warming? Almost any time you see a report on the subject, correct? Have you ever considered how this belief that a consensus exists came to be, and if it actually means anything? Answering such questions is the Wall Street Journal's Holman W.…