Bloomberg

Yet another important economic statistic confidently predicted to rise has fallen — hard. This time it was June's pending sales of existing homes. Just in time for summer, they were predicted to increase by a seasonally adjusted 1.0 percent to 1.5 percent. Instead they fell by 1.8 percent, the steepest drop since December 2013. Additionally, May's original 0.9 percent increase was revised down…

The Conference Board's July Consumer Confidence report released earlier today threw a heavy dose of cold water on the idea that the economy might finally achieve a broad-based, genuine recovery this year. Despite month after month of "all is well" reporting — and excuse-making when all hasn't been well — from the U.S. business press, the American public has apparently finally figured out that…

Thanks to year-over-year declines in manufacturing orders, manufacturing shipments, and wholesale sales, along with bloated inventories, apologists for the current condition of the U.S. economy are down to three defenses supposedly demonstrating that all is still really well after yet another rough first quarter (once again excused away as due to supposedly historically awful winter weather).…

In June, Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley unveiled a "climate change plan." The press loved it. Glowing articles appeared in many place, including the Washington Post, USA Today, The Hill and the Huffington Post, whose Kate Sheppard wrote that the former Maryland Governor had "Just Set An Extremely High Bar ... For 2016 Democratic Contenders." Well, if they're so wired into…

Has it come this? Conservatives need to rely on the liberal Mark Halperin to "follow up" on CNN's softball interviews with Hillary Clinton? Halperin grilled top Clinton adviser Jennifer Palmieri on a question the 2016 candidate ignored when she was on CNN. In early July, Brianna Keilar asked Clinton a question about deleting 30,000 e-mails. The Democrat didn't answer. On Wednesday, Halperin…

Nicholas Confessore and Maggie Haberman at the New York Times studiously avoided talking about Hillary Clinton's campaign spending in their front-page print edition story Thursday ("Hillary Clinton Lags in Engaging Grass-Roots Donors"). Mrs. Clinton hauled in $48.7 million, but she spent a stunning $18.7 million. As seen in a table accompanying the Times story, that's more than triple that of…

The serious sales slumps combined with inventory buildups in manufacturing and wholesale industries, documented in previous NewsBusters posts, continues. So does the establishment press's determination to ignore them. At the Associated Press today, Christopher Rugaber was tasked to cover the Federal Reserve's June release on Industrial Production. The good news is that the Fed report showed an…

As I was looking for news coverage of Thursday's horrid factory orders report from the Census Bureau late last week, I came across an incredibly optimistic Blomberg News report by Victoria Stilwell. The headline of her story on July 1, the day before that factory orders release, read: "Factories Making a Comeback as U.S. Domestic Demand Picks Up." My reaction: On what planet? It turns out that…

The media’s tendency to use the Pope to criticize Republican candidates and officials was on display Wednesday afternoon as MSNBC’s Live with Thomas Roberts and Bloomberg’s With All Due Respect took shots at the 2016 GOP presidential field and, specifically, Catholics Jeb Bush and Rick Santorum (in the case of the latter show) for opposing Pope Francis’s upcoming encyclical on global warming.

Today's release from the Federal Reserve on industrial production (including mining and utilities) told us that it declined by a seasonally adjusted 0.2 percent in May. It was the sixth consecutive month showing a decline or no gain, during which time output has fallen by 1.1 percent (not annualized). Bloomberg News, which reported that economists and analysts expected an increase of 0.2 percent…

On Thursday, the Census Bureau's report on May retail sales said that seasonally adjusted sales came in 1.2 percent higher than April. The press almost universally cited that result as demonstrating that the economy's rough patch earlier this year is likely over. Yours truly and the contrarians at Zero Hedge both noted that the result is highly suspect, and doesn't adequately reflect the raw…

The business press has gotten really excited about the possibility — some of them are even treating it as a probability — that the first-quarter's recently reported annualized economic contraction of 0.7 percent will go positive if it gets revised for so-called "residual seasonality." "Residual seasonality" is "the manifestation of seasonal patterns in data that have already been seasonally…

In a contest for the most consistent media fool of the year, Bloomberg's Mark Halperin would be an early favorite to take the top prize for 2015. This year, Halperin has already had at least three instances of outrageous hackery. As will be seen, for sheer hypocrisy, his most recent is arguably his worst.

As we have seen, members of the mainstream media met to complain about the "excessively tight grip on information" by the Hillary Clinton campaign. So what was the reaction? As relayed by Texas Southern University where Hillary will be appearing tomorrow, "There will be NO opportunities to interview Hillary Clinton; her speech will be her interview." Got that? Yet another lesson from the Clinton…