We’ve been slowly turning a corner in housing for a while, and recent plunges in prices in the Atlanta area are almost certain to help clear some of the excess inventory. Most of the time when I write about housing,…
Category: Economics
Delhaize closing dozens of stores in Europe and U.S., including 4 Food Lion supermarkets in metro Savannah
There’s a big international story here. From Bloomberg’s Delhaize to Cut 5,000 Jobs as Food Lion Owner Shuts Stores in U.S., Europe: Delhaize Group SA (DELB), the owner of Food Lion supermarkets, plans to cut about 5,000 positions and expects…
Newly released 2006 notes show how badly Greenspan, Bernanke, and the Fed missed the housing bubble
I think that Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve generally have done a pretty good job managing the fallout from the financial crisis in 2008. But — despite ample warnings from credible analysts for a period of years — Greenspan…
Key policy proposals from Governor Deal’s State of the State address
You can read the entire State of the State address here. Governor Nathan Deal delivered it last evening (Tuesday) to the Georgia legislature. As I noted in a post yesterday about some of the Governor’s economic initiatives, I find the…
S.C. Coastal Conservation League director vows “long and expensive battle” against Savannah River dredging
Steve Eames, director of the South Carolina Coastal Conservation League’s Beaufort Office, has a provocative editorial up today at FITSNews. I appreciate Eames’ piece because he actually knows the facts involving the Corps of Engineers’ predicted environmental impacts, especially regarding…
Governor Deal’s press release on improving the business climate in Georgia
I’ll circle back around and make some comments about various specifics here soon. My initial impression is that this is a surprisingly modest agenda given a) the problems facing Georgia’s economy and b) the fact that governors rarely seem to…
Los Angeles Magazine, NYT take long looks at parking — and all those spaces sitting idle
I don’t know what my life is coming to. Friends sent me two lengthy and interesting pieces about parking today — and I read them both in their entirety. From Between the Lines in LA Mag, which focuses largely on…
Governments cutting jobs at record rate since 2009
From Under Obama, a Record Decline in Government Jobs by Floyd Norris at the Economix blog at the NYT: When Barack Obama ran for president four years ago, he appalled some Democrats by saying Ronald Reagan had been a transformational…
The Economist: Worldwide GDP and inflation forecasts for 2012
We’re by no means out of the woods yet, and the biggest danger for 2012 (the biggest one we know about, at least) remains the possible financial contagion from a deepening crisis in the Eurozone. But there’s a growing consensus…
Georgia governor wants to restore half of the 20 pre-K days cut last year
Last year’s cut of 20 days from the pre-kindergarten calendar had a predictable result: the retention rate for pre-K teachers fell markedly. So this year’s pre-K students are getting 20 fewer class days, and those days are being managed by…
U.S. added 200,000 jobs in December; unemployment rate at 8.5%; U-6 falls to 15.2%
From the Bureau of Labor Statistics press release this a.m.: Nonfarm payroll employment rose by 200,000 in December, and the unemployment rate, at 8.5 percent, continued to trend down, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred…
A number of errors in NPR’s “The Race To Dig Deeper Ports For Bigger Cargo Ships”
I think there are a number of objections that one could raise to NPR’s The Race To Dig Deeper Ports For Bigger Cargo Ships, which ran this afternoon on All Things Considered. But it’s still worth a listen, I think.…
A followup on Georgia’s 2011 anti-immigration bill: Georgia farms lost $74.9 million because of labor shortages
I was a staunch opponent of HB 87, which established a number of tough new measures to combat the presence of undocumented workers in Georgia. Even though most of the law’s provisions weren’t even in effect in 2011, migrant farm…