For those who follow such things, CoreLogic (whose home price index housing market observers follow) has released its report on negative equity by state for the fourth quarter of 2010. The data is discussed a bit here on Calculated Risk,…
Category: Economics
Misleading headlines on Georgia state revenue growth
About this time each month, Georgia releases the revenue figures from the previous month. The state’s two major revenue streams — individual income taxes and sales taxes — are also good barometers of the economy generally. So today there’s this…
More details on Georgia banking crisis
I’ve written a number of times in this blog — and often in my column in the Savannah Morning News too — about the banking crisis in Georgia, which seems to have gotten more scrutiny from outside the state than…
Georgia democrats want a means test for HOPE
I’ve written previously about the necessary cuts to HOPE scholarships in Georgia. I thought that the Governor’s original money-saving proposal relied too heavily on cuts to Pre-K (where school days would be trimmed), but Gov. Deal has backed off on…
More thoughts on dredging and jobs
Those interested in the issue of dredging the Savannah River to accommodate larger vessels after the expansion of the Panamal Canal is completed in a few years should go straight to a piece by Mary Landers in today’s Savannah Morning…
Morning headlines: politics and the port, Georgia poised to mimic Arizona, Fannie and Freddie phase out debated, more examples of city bureaucracy
Lots of interesting headlines this morning. I could go on and on about each of these items, but I’ll keep it short. An interesting article from Maria Saporta with the Atlanta Business Chronicle on the pretty obvious political quandary of…
Georgia legislature headed toward a controversial crackdown on illegal immigration
A couple of weeks ago, representatives of affected industries — especially agriculture — seemed like they would sway the Georgia legislature away from passing an “Arizona-style” law targeting illegal immigrants. But it looks at this point that some version of…
Port cargo growth would stay the same with or without deepening, according to the Corps of Engineers
My column in the Savannah Morning News today, “Harbor deepening and its benefits”, is one of the most important I’ve written in some time. I am not going to quote or even recap all of it here, so I’d encourage…
Some thoughts on the cuts to HOPE scholarships
As was widely expected and necessary, Gov. Nathan Deal proposed cuts to the lottery-funded HOPE scholarship and pre-K programs. I haven’t been thrilled with the comprehensiveness of any of the news reports I’ve seen so far, but the AJC’s seems…
National home prices down 3.9% in 4th quarter of 2010, according to Case-Shiller
Regular readers know that I’ve been writing for a long time about house prices — and I’ve been writing for well over a year about the inevitability of continued price declines. As I discussed at length here, the homebuyer tax…
Another Savannah metro area bank closed by the FDIC
In this post, I provided a good deal of background about the banking crisis in Georgia. At some point soon I’ll update the statistics in that post. We are obviously having another busy year for the FDIC in Georgia, primarily…
Georgia Conservancy President muddies the water on harbor deepening
A couple of days ago, Georgia Conservancy president Pierre Howard published an op-ed in the Savannah Morning News: “Deepen port, protect resources”. At first, the piece might have seemed a blessing to proponents of the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project and…
A “pittance” of funding for harbor dredging: what now?
We’re all going to be reading and hearing a lot in the coming weeks and months about the Obama administration’s decision to include only a $600,000 “pittance” (the AJC’s characterization) in its 2011 budget for the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project.…
Savannah housing market update: new listings down from a year ago, but inventory still too high
For a great roundup of the Savannah metro area real estate sales data from January, check out Adam Van Brimmer’s “Local housing market trudges along” in today’s Savannah Morning News. Since Adam moved from sports writing to business writing, which…