From the Department of Duh, here’s a pretty cogent piece in the The Washington Post about our current sluggish economy: Recovery could be one of the longest, most difficult in history, economists say. I’ve been writing and talking about this…
Category: Economics
Odds looking better for high speed rail from Chattanooga to Atlanta
I’ve made a number of posts lately about transit and transportation projects and problems in Georgia. Here’s a bit of good news in my opinion. The Associated Press is reporting that matching funds for a federal grant have been secured…
NYT takes a close look at the Panama Canal expansion
We still don’t know what the final outcome will be in the drive to deepen the channel of the Savannah River in advance of the scheduled 2014 expansion of the Panama Canal, but work is moving ahead in Panama. There’s…
Regional rail from Atlanta into middle Georgia another casualty of flawed sales tax proposal
I’ve written quite a bit about transit lately, including the general lack of commitment to transit projects in road-addicted Georgia. As I noted in a post yesterday, Georgia is right at the bottom in terms of state funding for transit…
Maria Saporta: State of Georgia MIA regarding transit funding
One reason I’m so pessimistic about the likelihood of a robust recovery for the state of Georgia is the lack of state will to nurture the economy of Atlanta. The Atlanta metro area has more than half the population of…
Some numbers regarding job growth in Texas
We’re going to be hearing and reading a lot about job growth in Texas under Governor Rick Perry now that he has entered the race for the Republican nomination. The numbers are tricky — and they are not nearly as…
$1.5 million sale sounds big, but still evidence of home price declines in Savannah’s historic district
As a real estate agent friend noted in a mass email, historic properties are still selling in Savannah. The fundamentals are certainly pretty lousy — too many listings and too few buyers, too many vacant condo conversion attempts — but…
AJC: 30 Georgia counties, 217 municipalities don’t have websites
So imagine you’re affiliated with a company that wishes to expand — one that’s willing to take a risk on opening a store or even a manufacturing plant of some sort in one of Georgia’s small rural counties. You’re doing…
No sign of recession in Georgia state revenue figures
There was lots of interesting economic data this past week — a crazy and volatile one by any standards. But there was no sign of that craziness in the release of Georgia’s state revenue figures for July, which showed a…
Which state economies are growing? Which aren’t?
Just a quick post here with a couple of recently released maps from the Philadelphia Federal Reserve. The Philly Fed regularly updates state-level data for their coincident economic index, which is a snapshot of the current state of the economy,…
Year-over-year gains in airport traffic slip in July
The passenger numbers from Savannah/Hilton Head International certainly aren’t the most important numbers that I follow. But the figures are interesting, and they’re clean in the sense of being valid for year-over-year comparisons. They’re also easy to find on the…
Recession’s toll on birth rates: fewer Americans having babies
A few days ago, I posted a link to an AJC article about Georgians postponing major decisions because of the shaky economy. Well it’s hard to imagine a decision that’s more major than having children — and look at the…
Lower gas prices on the way
You might want to wait a while before filling up the tank again. As I’ve noted before, gas prices of late have been increasing when the economy has seemed to be doing better — and falling when there are fresh…
Pimco founder: weak demand a bigger problem than debt
I’ve been writing a lot lately about something that seems pretty obvious to me: weak demand is at the heart of our current economic woes, not the manufactured short-term debt “crisis” or even the very real long-term debt and deficit…