When the Federal Reserve decided last night to make an emergency 0.75 percent cut in its target federal funds rate, eight members of the Federal Open Market Committee approved the move. The lone dissenter was William Poole, president of the Federal Reserve…

Russ Roberts, the former Washington U. economist who’s now at George Mason University, makes some very good points about why an economic stimulus package won’t work. In an essay for National Public Radio, he starts with some sound logic:

But…

The Economist finds that you could have accurately gauged the last two recessions by counting the number of times the word “recession” appeared in the Washington Post and New York Times. Currently, the magazine says this R-word index is soaring and “sounding alarms,”…

The U.S. Senate’s Joint Economic Committee has scheduled a hearing next Wednesday on ways to stimulate the economy. Among the scheduled witnesses is former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, who recently called for a stimulus package of between $50 billion and $75 billion.

Summers…

Hand-wringing over the dire state of the  middle class is  a staple of certain presidential wannabes’ rhetoric. John Edwards,  for example,  says:

Middle-class wages have stagnated in recent years even as the economy has grown.

And Hillary Clinton asserts:

America’s middle class…

When I talked to economists about last week’s disappointing jobs numbers, I asked them whether the economy is in danger of slipping into recession. Uniformly, the answer was that the chances of a recession have risen but remain low, well under…

Having just written a column about the employment situation, I was interested to learn that some economists have found the press to be biased  in the way it reports such news.

A  National Bureau of Economic Research working paper  compares newspapers’ political…