The hell with data! Where's our recession????

Quick, would someone please tell the Democrats that we're not in a recession?

I don't know who the candidate will be (and God help us if it's Hillary, because I'm not convinced McCain can beat her), but both Hill and O take it as an article of faith that we are in a recession, that it's all doom and gloom, that it's All Bush's Fault, that it's All Because of Iraq, and that therefore it All Boils Down To this rather silly "equation":

McCain = Iraq = Bush = Recession!

I put "equation" in quotes, of course, because emotions are neither facts no numbers.

While I wouldn't expect news which is emotionally unsatisfying to reach the front page of the paper, the business section of today's Inquirer.....

Sorry there.

I was just about to supply a link to some good economic news, but I can't. For whatever reason, today's otherwise normal-looking article by Mike Armstrong does not appear online, at least, not in any form I can locate.

According to the headline, it's good news:

Regional Data point upward

At least, I think that's good news. So where the hell is it? Today's column doesn't show up on the front page of the business section, nor not in Mike Armstrong's blog. Nor can I find it if I search the Inquirer.

And in specific searches, neither the first sentence -- "To the vast majority of people, it doesn't matter whether the United States is in a recession or not" -- nor the last -- "The recent data sure don't indicate a recession" turn up in the online edition of the paper.

Nor do they seem to appear online anywhere. A Google News search for "To the vast majority of people, it doesn't matter whether the United States is in a recession or not" yielded nothing, and similarly, a Web search failed.

Ditto the last sentence -- "The recent data sure don't indicate a recession." Nothing in News nor in a general Web search.

[If anyone else can find this stuff, please let me know. I couldn't. However, I don't have Lexis Nexis search capability.]

What gives here? Is there such a thing as selective news?

Do I have to constantly photograph or scan my newspaper to discuss what's in it? I mean, I will, but this sometimes gets to be a bit of a pain in the ass.

Anyway, here's the scan:

armstrongScan.jpg

And while my OCR software recoils at the task of pulling out words from gray text boxes, I was nonetheless able to convert the text, which appears below in full.

I'm no economist, but if "the good news" is that "the recent data sure don't indicate a recession," it ought to be reported.

I'm thinking, might there be a problem with the stubborn refusal of the economy to behave as it should and go into a recession in time for the election?

Is that why Armstrong's column is playing hide and seek?

I don't know, but the column reminded me of some gently sarcastic puzzlement expressed by leading economist Greg Mankiw the other day, when he linked the following chart:

industrial_production.png

That shows that the industrial production (a key measure of recessionary cycles) simply does not indicate a recession. If it did, we'd be in one of the gray bars.

Noted Mankiw (in what I think is a delicious understatement),

Someone forgot to tell the IP data that we're in a recession.
Someone is also forgetting to let the public in on the full economic news, and in an election!

I don't see why I should have to go into full teeth-pulling mode in this blog, but I will. I wish I could do this by means of a normal news link.

But what I'm having to do seems more like a news leak.

The worst thing about this is that I'm no more an economics blogger than I am a war blogger. However, I'm noticing a similar rule of reporting in both.

Bad news is good and good news is bad.

Oh the irony.

MORE: I am not arguing that the Philadelphia Inquirer (or any other newspaper) has a duty to make their stories available online. (Under the First Amendment, they can do whatever they want.) However, I think that when a highly relevant story about the economy appears in the print edition in a newspaper which is generally available online, it would be fair to treat it the same way other news stories are treated.

In any event, I thought it was highly newsworthy. So much so, that I decided to "report" it on my own.

UPDATE: Yay!

At 1:07 p.m. today, Mike Armstrong's column was posted, and it now appears in the Inquirer as a blog post titled "Could states' economies predict national recession?."

(Not the same title as "Regional Data point upward," but at least it's there....)

Scanned text from Mike Armstrong's column:

Regional Data point upward


To the vast majority of people, it doesn't matter whether the United States is in a recession or not. They're struggling financially. More economists say they think we're in a recession than in an economic slowdown. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke even told Congress earlier this month that a recession is possible, but so is a rebound this year.

The official arbiter of when recessions begin and end is the National Bureau of Economic Analysis. Don't call and ask if we're in one now. The bureau doesn't usually anoint a recession until seven months after it began.

But plenty of us keep looking for those clues to the state of the economy. In fact, in 2001, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia began looking at individual states to see if the health of the parts might have something to say about the whole.

Jason Novak, senior economic analyst at the Philly Fed, has been studying monthly "coincident index" data for the 50 states. The indexes are a compilation of labor-market conditions and real-wage data. Yesterday, the Fed released the February-to-March data, which show the indexes rising in 19 states, declining in 22 and unchanged in nine. Over the first quarter, the indexes are up for 31 states, down for 14 and unchanged for five.

To Novak, state economic trends offer more insight into current conditions than
national trends alone. "It makes sense to understand local conditions, because we experience the economy locally," he said in an e-mail.

In a paper, Novak did correlate declines in the state coincident indexes to the four most recent recessions. It's possible that the indexes could give advance warning of recessions.

But he cautions that them indexes can deliver false positives and negatives because of revisions to employment data.

The good news? The recent data sure don't indicate a recession.

Contact Mike Armstrong at 215-854-2980 or
marmstronq@phillynews. com.

See his blog at www.phillyinc.biz and Philadelphia Business Today
weekday Webcasts at

www.philly.com/business.

posted by Eric on 04.23.08 at 09:21 AM





TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://classicalvalues.com/cgi-bin/pings.cgi/6544






Comments

The undervalued dollar is pulling in a lot of orders from the rest of the world.

BMW is building a plant in the US instead of shipping them form high priced Germany.

Housing is in a recession. Industrial and farm economies are booming.

M. Simon   ·  April 23, 2008 12:46 PM

It was finally posted at 1:07 p.m. and I updated the post as soon as I found out (around 3:30 p.m.).

Eric Scheie   ·  April 23, 2008 04:22 PM

Post a comment

You may use basic HTML for formatting.





Remember Me?

(you may use HTML tags for style)



April 2008
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
    1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30      

ANCIENT (AND MODERN)
WORLD-WIDE CALENDAR


Search the Site


E-mail




Classics To Go

Classical Values PDA Link



Archives




Recent Entries



Links



Site Credits