Business Coverage

The title of a post at Business Insider crows, “Here's The Ballsy Businessweek Cover That's Going To Piss Off The Mormon Church.” In truth, it should anger anyone who finds it low and, frankly, un-American, to attack a candidate – directly or indirectly – through his religion. But with Mitt Romney running neck and neck with Barack Obama, Bloomberg Businessweek saw the opportunity to further…

Not only is the Associated Press aptly currently described as the Administration's Press -- as least as long as the White House's current occupant remains there -- it also seems to be serving as the Administration's Protection. In a story about the "Lie-bor" scandal, wherein British banks have admitted to colluding to set the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) -- arguably the world’s most…

The establishment press often pays a price in lost credibility when it ignores important economic reports. The original omission is bad enough, of course. But when subsequent business coverage makes assertions which the ignored reports directly refute, it leaves you wondering why you should even try to believe anything they compose. Such is the case with Martin Crutsinger's report today on…

At the Associated Press, Christina Rexrode placed the blame for Monday's mediocre performance in the stock market squarely and obviously where it belonged: "Stocks struggled to stay out of the red in quiet holiday-week trading after a trade group said American manufacturing shrank in June for the first time in almost three years." The trade group involved is the Institute for Supply Management…

I'll bet it would shake people up to know that all of the recent and steep decline in consumer confidence has occurred in households earning $75,000 or more per year. On Friday, the June Thomson Reuters and the University of Michigan Survey of Consumers told us just that. The key sentence in the U of M press release reads as follows (PDF; bold is mine): "Perhaps of greater importance was that…

Recent job cuts at Alabama newspapers have been steep. The Birmingham Business Journal, which (ahem) apparently is not among the participants, reports that "Three of Alabama’s largest daily newspapers, including the Birmingham News, will lay off about 400 employees as they cut back their printing schedules and increase their focus on digital." The other affected publications include the…

At the Associated Press today, trying to build an impression of momentum where there isn't very much, Martin Crutsinger, concerning today's Census Bureau release of May new-home sales data, wrote that, "Americans bought new homes in May at the fastest pace in more than two years. The increase suggests a modest recovery is continuing in the U.S. housing market, despite weaker job growth." We'…

If this were a prize fight, it would have ended at the end of the sixth round in a knockout. In a post at the American Enterprise Institute's blog this afternoon, James Pethokoukis, who previously toiled at U.S. News and Reuters, made mincemeat out of Washington Post reporter Tom Hamburger's Thursday Mitt Romney-Bain Capital hit piece ("Romney’s Bain Capital invested in companies that moved…

Financial reporter Nathaniel Popper made the front of the New York Times Sunday Business section using the language of Occupy Wall Street, in a populist crusade against high chief executive pay disguised as a news story: "C.E.O. Pay, Rising Despite the Din." Popper talked in familiar terms of "revolution," "the 99 percent," and the "nation’s have-a-lots" versus "the have-lesses," and the term…

It wouldn't quite be fair to say that the Associated Press's Christopher Rugaber sugarcoated his dispatch on today's release of the April Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) by Uncle Sam's Bureau of Labor Statistics. But it would be more than fair to say he missed several chances to tell readers how significant the setbacks BLS relayed really were (openings fell 8.7% from a…

During the 1980s, despite data which even then was telling them they were wrong, it became a mantra of a desperate establishment press that the booming economy under Ronald Reagan really wasn't that impressive because so many of the new jobs created were part-time or temporary. The data was not then readily available for temps, but it certainly was for part-time vs. full-time employment. It…

Sometimes it takes a bit of exertion to disprove an assertion made by an establishment press reporter. Not this time. Today's Department of Labor report on initial unemployment claims told us that such filings "unexpectedly" (as relayed by Reuters and Bloomberg) rose to 386,000 from an upwardly revised (of course) 380,000 the previous week; expectations were for a fall to 375,000. About an hour…

In a rural area where “The economy sucks when it’s good,” natural gas drilling could have gone a long way. Could have, until environmental extremists and regulators got in the way. That’s what happened in Wayne County, Pa., just a few years ago when “corporations offered struggling farmers lucrative leases for mineral rights” but a documentary filmmaker and government prevented the drilling…

The $82 billion auto bailout has been a Crony Socialist nightmare mess. We’re going to lose at least $30 billion on the deal.  And that’s only if the Barack Obama Administration’s math can be trusted - a dicey proposition at best. The Administration eviscerated two hundred-plus years of bankruptcy law, throwing bond holders over the side to over-reward their United Auto Workers shock force…