Does today’s negative unemployment report offer evidence that this year’s giant stimulus bill isn’t working? And if so, is that because it wasn’t big enough or because more government spending isn’t the antidote to what ails us? A sampling of economists’ online opinions shows most sticking to their ideological guns, whatever the make. Robert Reich, [...]

Aye caramba, oy vey, and ah fudge. The September unemployment report? Not so good. The jobless rate hit a 26-year high of 9.8% and the economy shed another 263,000 jobs, worse than expected. If one of those positions was yours, you could probably give a rat’s rear end about what the economists are saying. Hunched [...]

You know the answer to that if you happened to catch Floyd Norris’s column in the New York Times today: “It was he who, at the end of 1861, figured out that the American government simply needed to print money to pay for the Civil War. It was economic heresy then, but without it this [...]

Referring to the current recessionary cycle, Joseph Stiglitz says we may be in for a W-shaped recovery. Norel Roubini thinks we could go W or U. George Soros said he didn’t see a V anywhere in site. What, exactly, are they talking about? Let us consult the Wiki. V-shaped recession: “The economy suffers a sharp [...]

Interesting post on the naked capitalism blog today, taking off on Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz’s comment that the U.S. may be in the middle of a W-shaped—or double dip—recession. Which means another economic contraction sooner rather than later. As poster Yves Smith sees it: The real issue is the ongoing con job. Team [...]

So you can go straight to the source(s), two more economist blogs: EconLog This provocative blog written by three libertarian economists includes posts like Would Milton Friedman have advocated last year’s bailout of banks? and a cost/benefit analysis of torture. EconomistMom.com Diane Lim Rogers works for The Concord Coalition, an organization that’s hawkish on the [...]

Fifteen video journalists from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism have produced some great reporting on the effects of the recession on individual New Yorkers. The videos are archived on Downsize NYC, which describes itself as exploring “not only the statistics but also the sensibilities of the economic crisis. Our stories consider how this recession [...]

Wikipedia has an elaborate process in which they choose the content that gets slated as a “featured article“—less than 1/10 of a percent of all articles on the site. (Listen to this interesting discussion—really!—among some Wikipedia power-users to get an idea of the standards used and the kind of people who have devoted so much [...]

Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich writes an oft-cited blog on which he posts thoughtful commentary on economic and political issues. Lately, he has been advocating for a public health care option and debunking some of the dubious claims being made about the bills currently under consideration. Reich also created a short-lived 2007 video log, [...]

With so much ink and and so many electronic bytes being devoted to the economy by the media, we thought it would be interesting to see what the professionals — economists — have to say about it themselves. Here’s the first group we took a look at: Grasping Reality with Both Hands – U.C. Berkeley [...]