The World Economic Forum released its Global Competitiveness Report for 133 countries. The top headline: US is out, Switzerland is in (number 1, that is); Singapore grabbed third place, pushing out Denmark.
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The Cash For Clunkers program represented a new wave of American thinking: let's get the bottom tail of the fuel-efficient autos distribution off the road. Scrap the environmentally unfriendly clunkers. Although the program did get the auto inventory moving, did it really scrap the worst' [...] 
I wanted to get this out right around the labor report; but alas, life kind of "took over". I digress. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the private payroll (total nonfarm payroll minus government jobs) shrank by just 254,000 jobs in July, the smallest [...] 
The RGE Monitor recently uploaded one of my articles on productivity. I believe that the corresponding comment deserves a public response; it refers to the tradeoff faced by employers between laying off workers or reducing hours worked (chart to left, where July hours worked [...] 
Usually productivity growth tumbles during a recession. Firms incorporate economic conditions at a lag, cut marginal costs (i.e., jobs), and the unemployment rises. Not this time.
Friday the FDIC closed another three banks: Community First Bank in Prineville, OR, Community National Bank of Sarasota County in Venice, FL, and First State Bank in Sarasota, Fl. While the FDIC transfers the deposits and liquidates the assets, one must wonder how many [...] 
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If you asked me, this constitutes good(ish) news: according to the European Central Bank's Q2 2009 bank lending survey (data here), the number of banks tightening standards is falling across all loan types. The credit crisis in Europe has likely passed...
Investment-grade corporate bond spreads are back to the previous recession's wides.
They expect the overall impact to be very limited, 250,000 autos in total (not the marginal impact). Furthermore, they note that so few passenger cars meet the eligibility requirements so mostly light trucks will be scrapped.
I have received a lot of requests to visit the velocity of money -the rate at which money changes hands. And I thought that it would be instructive to compare the US velocity to another non-QE G7 economy. And since I have a lot of Canadian [...] 
An excerpt the BBC article, Giving up my iPod for a Walkman:It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman [...] 
The thing about a global turning point is: some economic indicators will increasingly improve, while others will continue to worsen.
We all know this chart: the "death of the labor market" represented by the surging unemployment rate. This recession has so far driven the unemployment rate, currently 9.5%, to nearly double the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) estimate of the natural rate of unemployment, 4.8%.
According to Deutsche Welle, Iceland's government is dishing out the dough to investigate its economic collapse. And boy, has it collapsed.
The Conference Board of Canada released its 2008 economic rankings for 17 high-income countries. It uses a grading system based on percentiles across the following categories: inflation (A), GDP growth (B), income per capita (C), labor productivity growth (C), unemployment rate (C), employment growth (C), [...] 
The Wall Street Journal is noting that the minimum wage hike may come at a bad time. This is the second minimum wage hike since the beginning of the recession. Some bullet points from the article (I added my commentary in bold):
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... according to Time Magazine:
It would be criminal of me not to post this chart. The 
