Take a gander at Yahoo!’s headlines this morning:
Once again, bad economic news comes, as Glenn Reynolds regularly notes, unexpectedly.
UPDATE: Guess these folks in the media have just believe that if a Democrat is president, with Congress passing his $800-billion recovery act, the economy must needs recover.
From the AP article Yahoo! linked:
Americans are losing faith that the economy will keep improving, according to a monthly survey.
The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index fell to 60.8 from a revised 66 in April, a sign of the toll that high gas prices, a choppy job outlook and a moribund housing market are taking on people’s psyches. Economists had expected an increase to 67. It was the lowest reading since November.
UP-UPDATE: “And who, by the way,” Michael Barone asks
. . . are the “economists” who had expected consumer confidence to rise? Perhaps the Associated Press writers could do a little investigation here and tell us who the economists are who keep getting things wrong. Or will they be content to keep characterizing negative economic trends as “unexpected”?
Coming sometime before Obama’s run is over: “Misery Index* Unexpectedly Hits 20%”
(* inflation plus unemployment)
(I mean both that Obama’s policies are taking us to a 20% misery index – it is only a matter of time – and that enough Americans are foolish enough in their support of Obama that it will take a 20% misery index to make them stop.)
It’s unexpected because economists expected it to rise, not fall. It’s not the author or mainstream media putting a spin on the article as you suggest.
The neighborhoods of New York City are full of vacant stores, mostly former restaurants. It would seem that people are tightening up their belts and the marginal food emporiums are the first to fall. Last evening, on one short block I passed a dead pizza joint, a Mexican goner, a defunct pub and a closed ice cream failure. There were still a couple of open places to eat and they had low price chalk-board come-ons attempting to lure cash flow.
The economists are not very good at keeping up with failed entrepreneurs, part timers with no work, and all the suppliers and landlords who lose the revenue.
When the news people continue to chatter about “unexpected” bad economic news, they are really pretending that unintended consequences of market manipulation don’t exist.
The stimulus was so huge that any mention of weakness in the national infrastructure should easily have been erased by the massive, directed infusion of stimulus money. I see that stimulus money is being spent on a dog park in Washington, D.C. so clearly, the infrastructure problems in that city have been cleared up down to the dog park level.
Whether there is unexpected unemployment in Washington, D.C. is something I will have to read about in the Washington Post. The same Washington Post that is shedding readers like leaves on an oak tree in November.
The neighborhoods of New York City are full of vacant stores, mostly former restaurants. It would seem that people are tightening up their belts and the marginal food emporiums are the first to fall. Last evening, on one short block I passed a dead pizza joint, a Mexican goner, a defunct pub and a closed ice cream failure. There were still a couple of open places to eat and they had low price chalk-board come-ons attempting to lure cash flow.
The economists are not very good at keeping up with failed entrepreneurs, part timers with no work, and all the suppliers and landlords who lose the revenue.
When the news people continue to chatter about “unexpected” bad economic news, they are really pretending that unintended consequences of market manipulation don’t exist.
The stimulus was so huge that any mention of weakness in the national infrastructure should easily have been erased by the massive, directed infusion of stimulus money. I see that stimulus money is being spent on a dog park in Washington, D.C. so clearly, the infrastructure problems in that city have been cleared up down to the dog park level.
Whether there is unexpected unemployment in Washington, D.C. is something I will have to read about in the Washington Post. The same Washington Post that is shedding readers like leaves on an oak tree in November.
You’ve managed to miss the point. The article itself is the spin. *Left-wing* economists expected consumer confidence to rise; *left-wing* economists keep expecting the economic news to be somehow good, and treat the mounting evidence to the contrary as “unexpected”, i.e. just bad luck or not anything Obama could be responsible for. Since the headline services are biased, they push that viewpoint in their selection of articles. This was only example #98,234,410.
Also, can aj please find examples of Presiden’t Bush’s tenure when the economy did something ‘unexpectedly’?
I expect the AP keep using the “unexpected” line until the cows turn purple & start singing operatic tunes in the pasture; they are Obamabots who believe in his big government crapola. AP’s spin doesn’t past muster given the high unemployment & inflation since Obama has been POTUS since 2009.
#7 I can. From 6 July 2007,
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_070607/content/01125107.member.html
Conversely, from 31 July 2009
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_073109/content/01125106.member.html
Sarbanes-Oxley, $400B deficits and 1% interest rates were wrong… but, I guess they were still a lot better than Dodd-Frank, $1.5T deficits and ZIRP / QE. Anyway, the economy thought so.