This post is a guest contribution by Paul Kasriel* of The Northern Trust Company.

The best measure of the current condition of the labor market is the state unemployment insurance data. These data are not samples or surveys with guesstimates of how many new jobs were created by new businesses, but the head count of actual people standing in actual unemployment insurance lines. Too be sure, because a government entity is doing the counting, the first count is not always the most accurate count. But after four weeks of counting and recounting, the number that emerges is the one that remains for all times. The monthly labor reports from the Establishment and Household surveys get revised over and over, literally, for years.

Weekly data, which the state unemployment insurance data are, are inherently “noisy.” So, in order to more accurately measure the signal rather than

For Immediate Release

Chicago, IL – October 12, 2009 – Zacks.com releases the list of companies likely to issue earnings surprises. This week’s list includes Intel (INTC), Goldman Sachs (GS), Google (GOOG), Fairchild Semiconductor International (FCS) and Safeway (SWY). To see more earnings analysis, visit http://at.zacks.com/?id=3207.

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This Week's Events

Large-cap companies will dominate the earnings headlines this week.

Six Dow components, including Intel (INTC), are scheduled to release third-quarter results. Joining them will be Goldman Sachs (GS) and Google (GOOG). In total, we have confirmed reports from 72 companies, 29 of which are in the S&P 500.

There will be quite a bit of economic data published, including CPI and industrial production and capacity utilization. We will also get the minutes from

...and a Rejoinder to Posner.

The CEA Analysis of ARRA's Impact

Yesterday, the Council of Economic Advisers released the first of its mandated reports on the impact of the ARRA on economic activity. Based upon a variety of approaches (VAR, multiplier based), it concludes:

"...our multiplier analysis and estimates from a wide range of private and public sector forecasters confirm the estimates from the statistical projection analysis. There is broad agreement that the ARRA has added between 2 and 3 percentage points to baseline real GDP growth in the second quarter of 2009 and around 3 percentage points in the third quarter.

There is also broad agreement that it has likely added between 600,000 and 1.1 million to employment (again, relative to what would have happened without stimulus) as of the third quarter."

The CEA actually conducted a series of analyses. The first is an informal approach, examining the contributions of components of GDP

Richard Posner has a critique of public intellectuals who work in the public sphere (with special reference to Christina Romer), either in government service, or in journalistic fora. Mark Thoma and Brad Delong have already made clear the (many) points at which Mr. Posner has gone astray. Parenthetically, I'll add that I wonder about the analytical abilities of anybody who lumps Phillip Glass (!) and Elliott Carter together into the highbrow music category (see page 18 in his tome Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (1991)). More substantively, I have a few of additional observations, some of which are amplifications of Brad Delong's points.

First, I agree with Mark Thoma that Mr. Posner apparently has little understanding of macroeconomics, either of old-style Keynesian type, or the new(er) real business cycle type, or certainly New Keynesian approaches. His charge that her current pronouncements are at sharp variance with

Ten years ago in his book The Return of Depression Economics, Paul Krugman* warned of the problems that would lead to the current crisis. Last year the professor and trenchant columnist was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. In the interview below with Daniel Huber, Credit Suisse’s Head of Publications, he talks of the reasons for the crisis, the lessons to be learned, and life as a winner of the Nobel Prize.

Daniel Huber: There are very few winners emerging from this crisis, but you seem to be one of them, because foreseeing this crisis a decade ago probably won you the Nobel Prize for Economics. Paul Krugman: Well, I think I’m enough of a humanitarian to wish things hadn’t turned out this way.

Would you consider yourself a pessimist or a realist? In my view, it seems they’re the same thing right now. But over the course of

Or, how ignorance sometimes invalidates a critique.

I am always amazed at how often people jump to the most paranoid interpretations. One case in point is this article by Evan Newmark entitled Mean Street: Obama's Big Fat Fibbing Budget on WSJ's Deal Journal:

Is the White House lying to the American public about the economy? Or, if not outright lying, is it being awfully stingy with the truth?

You have to wonder.

After all, the Obama economic team is full of very smart people. And they have to see the same things that you and I see.

They see April's lousy retail numbers and record foreclosure rate. They see unemployment at 8.9%, state tax revenues facing double-digit declines, and a 14% fall in home prices last quarter.

So how can National Economic Council boss Larry Summers, Council of Economic Advisers chief Christina Romer or Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner still believe in

The typical Econbrowser reader might not be surprised at the NBER decision -- but some others will. From a May 2008 WSJ article:

"The data are pretty clear that we are not in a recession," Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Edward Lazear told a meeting of editors and reporters from the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires.

...

"I would be very surprised if the NBER, looking back at this period, would date this as a recession," Mr. Lazear said. There are even indications that revised first-quarter estimates would be slightly stronger than 0.6%. "The optimists seem to have been closer to right on that than the pessimists," he said.

Just to reiterate, that quote is from May 2008.

Here's a picture of GDP and gross domestic income (as suggested by Jim in this post, and noted in the BCDC announcement).