A glint of economic hope?
Yippee! Small businesses are whining about taxes and regulations again
New home construction in Alexandria, Va. (Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque) Calculated Risk — your one-stop shop for timely and comprehensive reporting on new economic data — points out something amusing and potentially important in the most recent survey of small business optimism conducted by the National Federation of Independent Businesses. In April “for the first time in years … ‘the single most important problem’” cited by small business owners was not “poor sales.” “Government red tape” edged out the longtime champion by the shadow of a hair. This is cause for celebration, because it means we’re getting back to normal.
In the best of times, small business owners complain about taxes and regulations, and that is starting to happen again.
As we scour the economic landscape for any data point, no matter how tiny, that will help us glean some sense of what the future holds, the fact that business owners might be seeing an uptick in consumer demand could be significant. This is especially true after the disappointing April jobs numbers released 10 days ago provoked a new round of mild panic about U.S. economic prospects.
We’re going to learn a lot this week about whether the economy is faltering. Due up in the next couple of days are reports on housing starts, homebuilder confidence, retail sales and manufacturing strength in the industrial Northeast. We can also take some solace in the fact that the data arriving since the April labor report has been mildly encouraging. After two straight decent weekly jobless claim reports, the four-week moving average is once again pointed down again, after rising for four straight weeks. New job openings reached their highest level since 2008. Gas prices have been falling steadily. One housing market watcher even reported that home prices rose by a tad in March — though only by comparison with February.
It’s all very tentative, and even the most common best-case scenario predicts only slow growth for the rest of the year. But let’s go back to those job openings numbers again. Calculated Risk points out that “quits” — also known as “voluntary separations” — rose in March, and along with job openings, have reached their highest level since 2008.
People don’t quit their jobs if they’re feeling nervous about their prospects of finding new work. Put that data point together with the declining prominence of “poor sales” as a concern for business owners, and you can begin to construct a scenario in which the economic recovery is finding firmer footing.
But keep your eye on the reports coming out this week. If the data comes in worse than the consensus expectations, that firmer footing will suddenly be revealed as quicksand.
Romney’s Jamie Dimon problem
JPMorgan's $2 billion blunder makes Mitt's pledge to repeal Obama's bank reform look dumb
Jamie Dimon (Credit: Reuters/Shannon Stapleton) Here is the most important sentence in Jamie Dimon’s Thursday afternoon conference call discussing JPMorgan’s colossal trading screw-up: “Just because we’re stupid doesn’t mean everybody else was.”
If you’re looking for the most easy-to-understand breakdown of how JPMorgan managed to lose $2 billion, read Marketplace reporter Heidi Moore’s fabulous explainer. Readers who fancy themselves financially sophisticated can ponder DealBreaker’s Matt Levine’s analysis. If all you want is a guide to the critics “flaying” Dimon’s hide, check out the New York Times’ DealBook.
Continue Reading CloseTuition is too damn high
Government is to blame for rising higher education costs -- but not for the reasons the GOP tells you
(Credit: hxdbzxy via Shutterstock/Salon/Benjamin Wheelock) College students in California received another dreary report card on Wednesday. Unless the state boosts its funding support for the public university system, warned school administrators, another 6 percent tuition hike could be on the way as soon as next year.
The officials may have been indulging in some good old-fashioned political grandstanding, hoping to whip up support for a November vote on a tax hike endorsed by Gov. Jerry Brown. But in a state where tuition fees have already doubled in just five years, another 6 percent hike is hardly unthinkable. And as a symbol of rising costs in higher education nationwide, California’s example is more than apt. Since 2001, tuition fees at four-year public colleges in the United States have risen at an annual average of 5.6 percent.
Continue Reading CloseJamie Dimon falls to earth
The CEO of JPMorgan, a strident critic of bank regulation, admits a spectacular trading loss
Jamie Dimon (Credit: Reuters/Keith Bedford) It was a quiet Thursday afternoon, and then Twitter exploded with the frenzy of a zillion financial pundits snarking all at once.
At 4:30 p.m. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon convened an impromptu conference call in which he admitted that a spectacularly bad bet by a London-based trader had resulted in at least $2 billion of trading losses over the last six weeks. And the numbers could get even worse, Dimon warned, depending on how the market behaved in upcoming days. Another $1 billion in losses could happen.
Continue Reading CloseRepublican climate folly
As temperatures break records, the GOP holds firm: The less we know about global warming, the better
Frank Gehrke, chief of snow surveys for the Department of Water Resources, stands in a snow-free meadow at Echo Summit, Calif. Warm spring weather, combined with lower then normal precipitation, caused the statewide snowpack water content to be only 40 percent of normal for this time of year. (Credit: AP/Rich Pedroncelli) Whatever adjective you choose — ironic? tragic? ludicrous? — the outcome of a series of budget votes held in the GOP-controlled House on Tuesday was definitely interesting. The chamber was wrangling over a series of amendments to an appropriations bill for the Departments of Commerce and Justice. The battle line was drawn between senior Republicans trying to resist further spending cuts, and young Turks looking to slash and burn.
In every case but one, the senior Republicans (with the help of Democrats) proved victorious. The lone exception? An amendment proposed by Maryland’s Andy Harris, cutting $542,000 in funding for a climate website at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Continue Reading CloseMaurice Sendak’s endless rumpus
"Where the Wild Things Are" captured the spirit of the 1960s -- but for my kids, its message remained just as vital
“Where the Wild Things Are” was published in 1963, just one year after I was born. This, I am sure, was no accident. I have always been up for a wild rumpus.
Which doesn’t make me particularly special. The 1960s, as “Mad Men” takes pains to remind us with each new episode, was a decade-long wild rumpus. If you didn’t seize every chance to ride piggy-back on half-menacing, half-jubilant dancing monsters you were ignoring the lesson of the age, something manifestly perceivable even to those of us who wouldn’t hit puberty until the ’70s. If it seems silly now that librarians used to draw diapers across the baby Max who starred in “In the Night Kitchen” — well, we can blame some combination of Sendak and the ’60s for our more refined modern sensibilities. As my mother, a neuroscientist, read “Where the Wild Things Are” to me, new synaptic connections spread like a grass fire in my brain. From Sendak to “Helter Skelter,” in one easy swoop.
Continue Reading ClosePage 1 of 689 in Andrew Leonard