Economy

Texas metropolitan regions hold down four of the top five and nine of the top 16 places in Milken's new Best Performing Cities Index, released this morning. The rankings were authored by previous New Geography Contributor Ross DeVol, director of Regional Economics at Milken.  read more »

Check out this chart from geoff at Innocent Bystanders plotting the actual recent unemployment rates against the predicted stimulus-reduced rate from Obama's recovery team:  read more »

The news is full of stories about the the impact of the ARRA on job creation, including this one from the The Wall Street Journal about a shoe store owner who created or saved nine jobs with less than $900.  read more »

Mark Hovind over at Jobbait.com released his monthly job market report, and this month he's expanded it significantly with sector-level data by state and metropolitan area.

Mark offers the numbers in an easily digestible format organized by state in color coded tables. It's a great way to get a feel for what's happening in your region or nationally.

Mark hopes this will help identify sectors with job prospects, even in regions where overall employment is declining.  read more »

This week in the UK saw the publication of a much-awaited report on social mobility. Member of Parliament Alan Milburn chaired the “Panel on Fair Access to the Professions,” which studied which segments of the British population are advancing upward into the professional class. The report has generated coverage and discussion in nearly every media outlet. So what did the report conclude?  read more »

The battle to find ways to close California's gaping $24 billion budget shortfall continues, with Governor Schwarzenegger calling for deep cuts and reorganization throughout state government. Last week, making a "rare speech to a joint session of the Legislature," Gov. Schwarzenegger argued that the state has "run out of time," and faces a situation where "Our wallet is empty, our bank is closed, and our credit is dried up".  read more »

This week Reuters is hosting a Food and Agriculture Summit in Chicago. On Tuesday presenters, including leading agribusiness executives and business economists, reported that despite the challenging global economic climate, the U.S. rural economy has weathered the recession better than most sectors due to steady demand for agricultural products, stable land prices and healthy credit lines for farmers".  read more »

How far can the totals go? Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke testified before the Senate Budget Committee on March 3, 2009. He believes that the markets will be “quite able” to absorb the debt issued by the US government over the next couple of years to cover all the bailout and stimulus payments  read more »

In the ten-year stretch from Sept. 1929 to Sept. 1939, spanning the worst years of the Great Depression, the stock market dropped a full 50%, adjusted for inflation. Look out, the current decade (Feb. 17, 1999 to Feb. 17, 2009) appears to yield the same decrease: the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index is down roughly 50%, also adjusted for inflation.  read more »

The business sections of newspapers have become doomsayers for the nation. Sensationalistic journalism decries of the failings and crises that have done our economy irreparable harm.

Rewind to a couple of years ago, and the print media was content with profiles of personable CEOs and pages upon pages devoted to the kitschy Mergers and Acquisitions. Where was the hard-hitting reporting that could’ve opened the public’s eyes to the failing economy much sooner?  read more »