Venezuela has a growing economy and a stable banking system. Their unemployment rate is 2% lower than ours. So why are they listed as #1?
Argentina has a current account surplus and large current account reserves. So why are they #3?

And finally, where is Britain? Why aren't they on this list? In fact, why are they still listed as AAA?

I disagree with your notion that making an economic blog “as good as we can make it” entails dehumanizing the discussion i.e. only talking about numbers. The economy is the product of human influences and decisions. Not to understand the character of the people who influence and make the decisions is to not understand the economy. This is not to say that ad hominem personal attacks are should be condoned.

This week I listened to Tim Geithener testify before the TARP oversight committee. This is the second time I have listen to him testify. Last was the House Banking Comm. I was shocked at his arrogance and indeed disrespectful tone then. But, that was nothing compared to the way he talked to Elizabeth Warren. For example, she said: “ I don’t understand why money is not getting to small banks.” His reply: “It’s really not all that complicated.” How condescending can you be to a person of her stature and responsibility?

Interestingly, last week she made the same point on CNBS and the interviewer suggested that she should be on an MSNBC show. I wonder if there is some sexism going on here. Intellectually she is a giant. How can you explain such disrespect? But, more to my point, the disrespect cannot be ignored if one is going to EXPLAIN the economy not just DESCRIBE it. Explanation, which is the essence of science, cannot be achieved without the personality variable factored in.

Today Mish called Geithener arrogant and ignorant. It is an important fact to be put into the economic discussion. It is important that we understand the personalities of economics, if you are going to understand and thereby change the economy. Similarly, Bonddad. Attention should be called to him because he has influence and he illustrates a category of economic thinkers that have to be addressed.

He and NDD have responded to the change in the GDP numbers in my mind pathetically. Nevertheless, to ignore them is to ignore the major ideologically factor governing public opinion and gov’t decisions.

If just-in-time governs inventory decisions (NEW SCHOOL) then how do you explain inventory liquidation? Just-in-time would preclude significant inventory to liquidate.

When failure is rewarded. Shouldn't they be giving Ben a Freedom Award too, or something like that?

I found a 9/14/09 version of a study that can be downloaded here.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1426219

I'm assuming it's the same study.

I just found this.

Growth was bolstered by consumption gaining 2.9% on the back of autos contributing 0.81 point to growth. That was a direct result of the August "Cash for Clunkers" program that subsidized new auto purchases.
In addition, residential investment added 0.45 point to the growth rate, its first add since 2006. This reflected the first-time homebuyer tax credit of up to $8,000 that brought out buyers as home prices fell.

So that makes 1.26% of the 2.2% GDP was from these government tax credits that contribute to higher consumer debt levels and rob from future sales.

I do that quite often and here are the reasons.

1. The government often doesn't grasp the idea of permanent links, so they can break on referencing links and then you cannot find the original data.

2. On many EI reports, they list "current" and so the report and the graphs of that monthly indicator are gone, so you cannot go back and compare what the previous report said. This is especially true on BLS initial weekly claims. Fortunately I had put the actual report on EP and that's how I became aware there was a consistent pattern of revising the previous week's report upward, which always made the current report look like it was trending downward.

3. I personally find these embedded sites for PDFs obnoxious. Firstly they give no link reference, so you have no idea where something came from or if it has been corrected or updated. But worse, PDFs already suck and browsers already have embedded tools for you to view them. All you're doing is adding yet another layer of embedding to a document....and why do that since EP software allows file uploads and linking to those files locally.

4. I try to get original reports in order to review them. It is so often another article, journalist and even blogger will highlight something in a report, but if you go read it yourself, you might find something very different in it. And why not read the original? This is the day of online distribution so while we can overview things, there's no reason EP readers shouldn't be directed to the original if they want to check out the reports directly on their own.

Now this article, by Shahien Nasiripour looks like he did quite a bit of digging to find the difference between types of investors and on first pass read of the actual report, "investor" i.e. bank owned, is buried...

so, linking to journalists who did their homework is worth it, but I still like to show the original.

(Anybody else noticing Shahien Nasiripour has been writing some very good investigative type of articles? I have.)

If the purpose was to keep people in their homes we would've had debt forgiveness/principal reduction a long time ago.

RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.

this study is just for one program, CPP of the many.

But they showed that the success rate was not correlated to the obtainment of support.

I couldn't find this study and I looked so if you see the actual study from these guys, please link/post it.

Be nice to see the results in the flesh so to speak.