Economy

The payroll and employment report from Bureau of Labor Statistics for November 2009 suggest that the US economy is entering a so-called V-shaped recovery, rather than a slower and more painful U- or W-shaped one.
Not only were only 11,000 jobs lost last month, the figure for October was revised upwards. Initial unemployment claims are showing [...]

A couple of months ago I quoted a local politician in Sweden recounting how government revenue projections are repeatedly revised downwards because of the terrible toll the recession in the United States is taking on the global economy’s export-driven participants. The local newspaper in my native city reports this weekend on another town that’s facing [...]

The New York Times reports on stagnating test scores in the National Assessment of Educational Progress:
Despite gains that both whites and minorities did make, the overall scores of the United States’ 17-year-old students, averaged across all groups, were the same as those of teenagers who took the test in the early 1970s. This was largely [...]

Massachusetts State Legislature has produced a veto-proof majority to increase the state’s sales tax from 5% to 7% to help meet the projected deficit in the state budget.
The pros and cons of tax hikes versus deficit spending versus budget cuts are well established, as are the pros and cons of increasing the sales tax specifically, [...]

Interesting nugget from British retail giant Tesco’s take on the global economy,as reported by the Wall Street Journal (subscription may be required):
One exception to the trend [of "upswing in consumer sentiment"], Tesco said, was the Western U.S. Tesco’s stores in Southern California, Phoenix and Las Vegas have been hit hard by the collapse of local [...]

Patriot Place, the retail center next to the New England Patriots home field Gillette Stadium, is working pretty hard to drum up business. On Patriots Day, April 20 - which has nothing to do with the Patriots - shoppers were allowed to walk across the field at the stadium, the movie theater showed the Boston [...]

The Boston Globe’s Megan Woolhouse has an article today on how that shortage of nurses that had politicians and hospital directors scrambling to bring in as many foreign nurses as possible predictably has turned into a shortage of jobs for nurses.
Writes Woolhouse:
When Katharine Barron enrolled in Boston College’s school of nursing in 2005, everyone - [...]

“Documentary and stock transfer tax” receipts collected by state governments illustrate the growth and collapse of the debt-fueled real estate bubble.
The figures below are for Massachusetts (MA) and the total for the fifty states (US) 2001 - 2008. Keep in mind that the figures are based on the states’ own reporting and some states - [...]

Revenue is dropping like a rock for governments at all levels in the United States and it isn’t any better in the countries that used to rake in the dough exporting to ever more leveraged consumers in the US. Here’s how an experienced city-level politician in Sweden describes this year’s budgeting process:
This crisis is quite [...]

Michale Hill of the Associate Press does a good job of describing the fiscal mess states got themselves into by acting as if the revenue windfall during the debt-fueled housing bubble was a new state of normal that would last forever:

The decline in state tax revenue is expected to drag on even after the economy [...]