Business Coverage

On May 1, the Associated Press's Paul Wiseman was pleased to tell the wire service's readers and subscribing outlets that "The University of Michigan's sentiment index rose to 95.9 from 93 in March," reaching "its second-highest level since 2007." Among other things, the survey's chief economist said that the result reflected "improving prospects for jobs and incomes." What a difference two…

When it comes to Hollywood, Proverbs got it right: there is nothing new under the sun. Trailers for ABC’s fall TV lineup are being released and the new show OIL appears to be more of same anti-gas and oil propaganda television networks and movie producers have been dredging up for years.

Chuck Todd should have been ready for this, but he wasn't. Just a few days days ago, on the very network at which Todd toils, "Late Night" comedian Seth Meyers thought he would be cute and embarrass GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina over not registering the CarlyFiorina.org domain, thereby allowing a critic to take it and use it as a platform for criticizing her tenure as H-P's CEO.…

On Thursday, Jennifer Grayson, who fancies herself as an "environmental journalist," exposed herself as a truly annoying scold. Grayson wrote in a Washington Post column that those of us who show our appreciation for others by giving them flowers as part of our overall enjoyment of life are really showing that we are either ignorant of or don't "care about Mother Earth." Grayson concocts her…

Tuesday evening, I wrote that there appears to be a need for an intervention among the economics writers at the Associated Press. At the time, I was referring to how the wire service's Christopher Rugaber, in his dispatch on a trade group's upbeat business sentiment survey appearing about an hour after Martin Crutsinger's writeup on the horrible March trade imbalance, failed to report Crutsinger…

It appears that someone might need to schedule an intervention with the Associated Press's economics writers. In his dispatch published a half-hour after the government's March release on international trade at 8:30 this morning, the wire service's Martin Crutsinger quoted a normally upbeat economist who was singing the blues about the result's effect on previously reported first-quarter…

At the Associated Press today, Martin Crutsinger's coverage of the Census Bureau's March Factory Orders report admitted that a leading economic forecasting firm currently believes that the economy will grow at an annualized rate of just 1.9 percent in the second quarter. Despite the fact that just about everyone who is anyone had until very recently been saying that the figure will be 3 percent…

On Thurday, the government, apparently as determined as the press to create good news where there is none, opened its March report on Personal Income and Outlays as follows: "Personal income increased $6.2 billion, or less than 0.1 percent." Yeah, it was so much less than 0.1 percent that it rounded down to 0.0 percent in current dollars in the table which followed. In real terms, i.e., after…

The so-called experts supposedly took March's worse than usual weather in many parts of the country into account when they predicted that this morning's March Construction Spending report from the Census Bureau would come in with a seasonally adjusted increase of 0.4 percent or 0.5 percent. Instead, the result was a decline 0.6 percent, "unexpectedly" sending that metric to a six-month low.…

An Associated Press report on small businesses hit with looting, fires and property destruction in Baltimore during the past several days wraps up with a final paragraph only a historically ignorant person could possibly believe. Without getting too personal, David Dishneau and Joyce M. Rosenberg, the two AP writers responsible for that final sentence, appear to be old enough and learned enough…

Japan just reported yet another awful retail sales result. Though it far exceeeded predictions of a 7.3 percent fall, the 9.7 percent March 2015 plunge compared to March 2014 doesn't reveal much, as March 2014 saw a splurge at the stores ahead of a steep sales tax increase which took effect on April 1. The really telling figure is the 1.9 percent seasonally adjusted dive compared to February.…

Today's Census Bureau report on durable goods orders was like a poorly made cake with delicious frosting: tasty at first, but awful when fully experienced. The frosting in today's report was that overall orders increased in March by a seasonally adjusted 4.0 percent. The trouble is that an important, widely recognized element of that report — what the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger vaguely…

The Census Bureau reported today that sales new homes in the U.S. (seasonally adjusted at an annual rate) plunged sharply in March to 481,000 after hitting a seven-year record level of 543,000 in February. As has been the case so often, AP reporter Josh Boak didn't look past the seasonally adjusted numbers, and as a result gave the "expert" he quoted a free pass to supply sunnyside-up commentary…

So when is a recession not a genuine recession? Apparently when it's "technical." Unfortunately, the term "technical recession" appears to be well on the way to devolving into what has long been considered the real definition of a recession for the purpose of discounting its validity.