Business Coverage

As has been demonstrated many times, including in its recent cover-up and weaselly non-correction of his "Gulf ports" gaffe, the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, continues to do its level best to keep President Obama's misstatements and misleading statements from wider public visibility. Two such instances occurred in one speech on Friday in Binghamton, New York, where Obama…

Anyone remember all the huffing and puffing from the establishment press about how third-quarter economic growth was going to be great — so please stop worrying about how weak the past three quarters (annualized rates of 0.1%, 1.1%, and 1.7%, respectively) have been? Oops. On Friday, the Census Bureau reported that new-home sales dropped over 20% in July to an annual rate of 394,000 from June…

A chart accompanying a writeup by Robert Pear at the New York Times on how Americans' real incomes have fallen and barely begun to recover is interesting in its selection of comparison points. Pear himself tried to pretend that what President Obama wants to do to try to make college more affordable is somehow relevant to reigniting economic growth. Really.

It seems that beat reporters need to be constantly reminded that they have their hands full just discerning the facts, relaying them coherently, and leaving the "analysis" to others (while presenting alternative analytical takes when necessary). The nagging is really for their own good. If they would stick to their jobs instead of "analyzing," which often is a cover for getting out their own…

At 10 a.m. this morning, the Census Bureau essentially declared the much-ballyhooed "housing recovery" an illusion. Only 35,000 homes were actually sold in July. That translates to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 394,000, miles below the expected 487,000 and 12% below June's 455,000, which was itself revised down from 497,000. After the jump, I'll reveal what supposedly leading personal…

After a two-year hiatus, the Associated Press has apparently decided that Americans need a weekly reminder of how bad weekly layoffs were during the recession. In June 2011, possibly as a result of some hectoring by yours truly, the wire service totally or almost totally stopped reminding readers that "(unemployment) claims applications peaked at 659,000 during the recession." That tired…

Maybe we should cue up the old classic "High Hopes," especially given its ironic title, every time one of these "unintended consequence of Obamacare" stories comes along. Instead of singing "Oops, there goes another rubber tree plant," we can all sing, "Oops, there goes another Obamacare 'quirk.'" One of the latest "quirks," also described as a "weird" result of the progressive movement's…

Maybe because it's a UFO, we're not supposed to be able to explain it. No, I'm not talking about unidentified flying objects at the recently acknowledged Area 51. I'm talking about an unexplained financial observation, the one made by the Associated Press's Christopher Rugaber on Monday after the release of the July Regional and State Employment and Unemployment report Monday morning. Rugaber…

A November 15, 2010 blog post by Michael S. Derby at the Wall Street Journal ("San Francisco Fed Official Says QE2 Is Working") told us that "The Federal Reserve‘s recently announced plan to buy $600 billion in Treasury securities to improve economic growth is having a positive effect on growth." The Fed official involved also predicted "the U.S. gross domestic product to come in at 2.5% this…

What do you do when you're the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, and you're trying to do your level best to described a floundering economy without incurring the wrath of the Obama administration? You search for positive-sounding words to describe what is in reality a marginal situation. The AP seems to have settled on "steady" and "steadily."

At the conclusion of his report on the federal government's July Monthly Treasury Statement, the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger wrote that federal spending through the first ten months of the current fiscal year is "down 2.9 percent from a year ago," and that the decline "reflects, in part, automatic government spending cuts that began taking effect March 1." Those "automatic cuts"…

It's fair to say that about the only holdouts against the idea that part-time work is up and that employee hours are being reduced around the economy are the Obama White House and a few Obama White House alumni. It's also fair to say that there are very few holdouts against the idea that the cause for this is Obamacare's 30-hours-per-week definition of a full-time employee, which is causing far…

Economists, business owners and employees are worried that the Affordable Care Act is resulting in fewer hours for workers. The networks had been ignoring this shift toward part-time work and its relationship to Obamacare earlier this year, but NBC has let the cat out of the bag. On the Aug. 13, “Nightly News” Lisa Myers reported on an NBC News investigation into the issue.