We Baby Boomers have all heard this refrain, and perhaps uttered it ourselves: If the stock market doesn’t recover, I may never be able to retire.

A new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, however, finds that fear to be…

As I point out in today’s column, the minimum-wage increase to $7.25 an hour is coming at a bad time for an economy where jobs are disappearing at a rapid rate. That, however, doesn’t stop some politicians from trying to…

Paul Christopher is among a large number of economists who think we’re close to the end of this recession. He’s also starting to worry about the next one.

Christopher, the global macro strategist for Eclipse Capital Management in Clayton, spoke this…

I’ll start with the caveats: A tenth of percentage point isn’t much, two months do not a trend make, and these figures sometimes get revised dramatically. Having said all that, there’s something remarkable about the latest unemployment numbers, chronicled earlier…

I occasionally hear from people who argue that the official unemployment rate understates the pain of the recession because it excludes people who have simply given up on finding a job. It’s a complex subject, addressed here in the Huffington Post, but one…

Bill Greiner, UMB Bank’s chief market strategist, predicts that the economy will recover in 2010 but says the stock market remains a dangerous place for now. The problem with the market is a lack of visibility about the financial system’s…

When last we talked to Ken Matheny of Macroeconomic Advisers, he was predicting that the recession would end in the second quarter of 2009. Now, he has pushed the projected recovery back to the third quarter. He also thinks gross…

Forbes magazine thinks losing sports teams make people miserable. So do lousy weather, high taxes, public corruption, crime, traffic jams, unemployment and environmental eyesores. And guess which city, alone among the 150 biggest in America, ranked in the bottom half of all those…

Maybe I’m ultra-sensitive to overhyped economic stories after listening to Chris Varvares yesterday. It seems to me that the accounts of today’s employment report — including the AP story on our own site — are overplaying the worst-since-1945 angle. The…

It’s the time of year when we reporters ask professional forecasters what the new year will look like. I’m also asking you, the readers of Mound City Money. Here’s your chance to make a collective prediction about where unemployment will…