Article Source The President's press conference yesterday was meant to buttress consumer and investor confidence. I will leave it to others to evaluate whether he was successful in this endeavor [0]. I will also ignore his disingenuous remarks concerning how allowing drilling offshore and in ANWR [1] would somehow affect gasoline prices today in a noticeable manner, and focus instead on his repeated emphasis on the fact that the economy is still growing (although he never mentioned at what pace). This statement is indeed accurate if one focuses on real GDP. I present the log of real GDP in Chained 2000$, normalized to 0 at the NBER-defined trough in 2001Q4. I also present for reference log GDP in the previous two expansions, normalized to 0 in the previous troughs in 1991Q1 and 1982Q4. (For those interested in output gaps, the mean WSJ forecast predicts output will be ...

In a lot of ways silver has been in recent decades the forgotten metal, struggling with an identity crisis as a poor man’s precious metal and/or a rather expensive industrial metal. In its glory days, Broken Hill in western New South Wales was known as Silver City, and to this day the highway leading into the town is so named. Broken Hill gave its name to a rather famous Proprietary, but these day’s when one thinks of BHP Billiton one doesn’t immediately think of silver, or for that matter the zinc and lead upon which the company built its foundations. Today junior mining companies are left to squabble over what commercial deposits may still remain at Broken Hill. Indeed for many years silver became merely a helpful by-product of mining for base metals occurring, as it often does, in base metal deposits. Base metal miners could sell the silver just ...