I’ve written a lot about increasing income disparity and wealth disparity in America. A consumer economy cannot thrive with such trends in place and worsening: with a larger and larger percentage of the population having little or no disposable income,…
The quarterly economic forecasts of Rajeev Dhawan, director of the Georgia State University Economic Forecasting Center, always deserve attention. He has consistently been a clear voice of reason amidst a lot of hype about the state’s economy. The AJC’s Atlanta…
I’ve reported routinely on the stagnating job market in Georgia generally and Savannah specifically. The jobs data has been getting gloomier of late, and today’s release of October data from the Georgia Department of Labor is pretty disturbing. The Savannah…
I’ve already posted this map from the Philadelphia Federal Reserve, which regularly updates its employment-based coincident and leading indices of economic activity: Note that that map is for September; we’ll get an October map in another week or so. Since…
There’s nothing new here for regular readers of my column or this blog, but the AJC has a good overview today about the prospects for a housing recovery in the Atlanta area: No quick recovery for metro housing market. I…
It now seems almost a given that, even if the U.S. technically avoids a recession, we’ll be hurt by the slowdown in Europe related to the continent’s debt crisis. That crisis is nowhere near over. From Calculated Risk yesterday, State…
I’ve repeatedly written about Georgia’s weak employment data. A recent study, highlighted in this piece in the WSJ, notes the extreme differences from state to state when it comes to regaining all the jobs lost during the recession and its…
From Animal McMansion: Students Trade Dorm for Suburban Luxury in today’s NYT: Here in Merced, a city in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley and one of the country’s hardest hit by home foreclosures, the downturn in the real…
Normally the FDIC shuts down banks on Fridays, but tomorrow is Veterans Day. From the press release: Community Bank of Rockmart, Rockmart, Georgia, was closed today by the Georgia Department of Banking and Finance, which appointed the Federal Deposit Insurance…
From the Atlanta Business Chronicle’s Atlanta fourth-highest in recession job losses: Of the 100 largest American cities, Atlanta had the fourth-highest private-sector job losses from September 2007 through September 2011, according to an On Numbers analysis of new data from…
I’ve been writing for ages about the inevitability of continued declines in home prices. Today’s release of CoreLogic’s Home Price Index pretty much confirms that that trend has arrived. CoreLogic’s HPI is not seasonally adjusted, and we’ve now hit the…
From the AJC’s Signs look hopeful 
for deepening river: For Atlanta, the consequences are huge. Businesses across the metro region shipped $9.5 billion in cargo through the ports of Savannah and Brunswick the past fiscal year, according to the Georgia…
We need to add at least 100,000 jobs per month to the nation’s economy to keep pace with population growth, so it’s hard to get too excited about the data for October. From the Bureau of Labor Statistics: Nonfarm payroll…
The Daily Beast recently compiled a list “America’s Brokest Cities” using “data points weighted equally: the most recently available unemployment rate (August 2011), median household income, and average debt. Data is from a recent report by Experian and the Bureau…
