Economy

With the nation locked in the firm grips of recession, one indicator of our country’s import demand and manufacturing capacity is being stockpiled in Montana. Just south of Great Falls, along the Missouri River, Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) Railway Co. is stockpiling flatbed container cars – a lot of flatbed cars.  read more »

For our War of the Regions piece I went through BLS data and calculated location quotients for a few key diverging industries, namely manufacturing and securities, commodities and investments side of the finance industry. These are the kind of numbers that really benefit from geographic visualization.

A LQ tells us not where the most jobs are in any given industry, but how much of a state's employment is clustered in the given industry.  read more »

A new report released today by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says that income inequality between the rich and poor has grown in three quarters of OECD nations over the past twenty years. The report, "Growing Unequal?", states that the gap between the rich and middle class in the United States has also grown.

According to the OECD report,  read more »

Recent soundings from Washington suggest that neither party has a solid idea of what to do about the deepening economic crisis. It makes me cringe to hear Barney Frank, Chairman of House Financial Services Committee, talking about a big stimulus to “prop up consumption”.  read more »

A recent article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal lamented the economic decline in the state according to a report by the Rockefeller Institute of Government in NY. The Rockefeller report cited a growth index released by the Philadelphia Fed, but reset the index to a baseline of January 2007, singling out Nevada as the worst performing state in the nation over that period.  read more »

Michael Lind of the New America Foundation has just published an excellent and inspiring article in Democracy Journal about the need for a new financial and physical infrastructure.  read more »

One interesting thing about the luxury economy today in the U.S. is how much of it is being driven by tourists and non-residents. Another salient point: how the very wealthy have been largely immune to the current downturn.  read more »

Mayor Daley said this week that the economy in Chicago is the worst that he's seen since becoming mayor.

You'd never guess this judging by the article about "demographic inversion" published in the New Republic by Alan Ehrenhalt . The author prints a lot of anecdotal evidence about on-going gentrification he witnesses in his hometown but unfortunately offers precious few statistics about job growth.  read more »