Anyone who’s filled up their tank recently may have trouble believing the latest Consumer Price Index report from the Labor Department. It says:

In April,  the index for petroleum-based energy fell 1.6 percent, offsetting a 2.5  percent increase in the…

Today’s GDP report seems to have caused traders at Intrade, the online betting/futures market, to rethink their recession bets. Trading there today has pushed odds of a recession down to 30 percent, from 44 percent yesterday. Intrade participants were placing 70 percent…

We’ve complained mildly about the quality of local employment statistics, but it looks like they’re going to get worse before they get better. Mark Liebman, senior economist at Fox Business, notes that the Bureau of Labor Statistics will stop reporting…

After writing about some economists who still don’t think we’re in a recession, I thought it would be interesting to revisit the Post-Dispatch R-Word Index. As regular readers will recall, the Economist magazine found a correlation between actual recessions and…

The cost of the war in Iraq is getting a lot of attention in this political season. A coalition of Democratic groups is raising $20 million for an effort to link the weakening economy with the war effort, and Nobel-winning…

Michael Dueker, a former St. Louis Fed economist now with Russell Investments, has a piece on Econbrowser about his recession-forecasting model. It’s a bit technical for the lay reader, but the bottom line isn’t hard to understand. Dueker writes that ”the model is…

Bill Poole has finished his 10-year stint on the policymaking Federal Open Market Committee. He is scheduled to retire next month as president of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, and, by custom, won’t participate in the March 18 FOMC meeting. But…

As a certified stimulus skeptic, I’m always happy when smart people agree with me — particularly when those people are as influential as Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank. Trichet said at a press conference this week:

With respect…

When I urged people to save their “stimulus” checks, not spend them, I had no idea that my advice would strike a sympathetic chord with the majority of Americans. But according to a survey just released by American Century Investments,…

Several people have asked me how the government will decide who gets the proposed economic stimulus rebates, which I wrote about in today’s column. Will it be based on last year’s income, a couple of readers asked, or on some estimate…