Economist

WASHINGTON -- U.S. industrial production rose in June, the seventh month without a decline, led by increased demand for automobiles, computers and electricity, according to a report yesterday.Output at factories, mines and utilities rose 0.2 percent last month, capping a 3.9 percent second-quarter annualized increase, the Federal Reserve said. The quarterly pace was the fastest in 18 months and triple the first quarter's rate."U.S. consumer and investment spending has provided a foundation of strength" for manufacturing and the economy, said Tim O'Neill, chief economist with Bank of Montreal and Harris Bank in Toronto.

WASHINGTON -- With the Dow touching 10,000, unemployment and inflation at remarkable lows and economic growth climbing, President Clinton is turning to the decade's stellar economic performance as a positive legacy for his administration.But as more economic mileposts are passed on Clinton's watch, debate is raging over how much credit the administration should take. The Dow Jones industrial average broke through the 10,000 mark yesterday for the first time, though it ended the day down 28 points, at 9,930.

WASHINGTON -- U.S. companies added jobs at a stronger-than-expected pace in February without an inflationary increase in wages, offering relief to stock and bond investors apprehensive that the Federal Reserve might push interest rates higher.The economy created 275,000 jobs last month, exceeding analysts' forecasts of a gain of 244,000 and January's increase of 217,000, Labor Department figures showed yesterday, drawing from a survey of employers. A surge in retail and construction hiring was tempered by a drop in factory payrolls.

HERE'S a paradox to ponder: The U.S. economy flourishes in the face of the global financial meltdown that reached the crisis stage last year, only to see growth squeezed when the once-brutalized markets abroad regain their health.While some economists say this won't happen soon, others say it's possible with the worst of the Asian contagion apparently history and with countries like South Korea, Japan and Germany showing signs of revival."Their bad luck has been our good luck," says Ira Silver, chief economist for retailer J. C. Penney & Co. Inc.For the United States, that good luck has translated into good fortune.

Maryland's economy finished 1998 with a flourish, adding 6,000 jobs in December and driving the state's unemployment rate down to 3.8 percent, its lowest point in almost a decade, the government said yesterday.It was more persuasive evidence that Maryland is fully sharing in the thumping national prosperity that has erased government deficits, employed the jobless, made homebuilders work weekends and lifted the stock market to once-unimaginable heights."It just looks very, very good," said Charles McMillion, an economist who follows Maryland for MBG Information Services Inc., a Washington-based forecasting and consulting firm.

The world's financial markets were sent into a tailspin yesterday when Brazil's top financial official resigned unexpectedly and his successor devalued the country's currency by 7.6 percent.Economists feared that the latest troubles of Latin America's largest economy could spread to other countries in the region -- and to the United States, which has substantial export and financial interests in Brazil.The Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 260 points in the first half-hour of trading after the announcement that Brazilian Central Bank chief Gustavo Franco had stepped down, and his replacement, Francisco Lopes, would allow the Brazilian currency, the real, to trade in a wider band against the dollar.

WASHINGTON -- Last summer, economist Cynthia Latta was crunching her forecasts for the burgeoning federal budget surplus when her projections reached a landmark simply too mind-boggling to accept: early in the next century, the publicly held federal debt would simply disappear.In a panic, the principal U.S. economist for Standard & Poors' DRI -- its forecasting division -- did what she expects Congress to do. She threw in some tax cuts, some extra government spending, and to her relief, the debt was back -- that is, until last week, when President Clinton announced that he planned to eliminate it by 2015.

Wal-Mart happens. So do Post-it Notes and beach volleyball. And the Internet, of course, happens and keeps happening.So what? So let it be, says writer Virginia Postrel.Perhaps that does not seem such a striking statement, but Postrel warns that there are those who would have it otherwise, who would stand in the way of the creations she celebrates as the good works of a free, innovative society.Her new book, "The Future and Its Enemies," presents a struggle of forces that has in many respects already rendered meaningless the old dichotomies of "liberal vs. conservative" and "left vs. right."

Herbert E. Klarman, 82, professor, health economistHerbert E. Klarman, a former Johns Hopkins University professor and noted health economist, died Thursday from complications of lymphoma at Union Memorial Hospital. The Homewood resident was 82.Mr. Klarman was professor in the Hopkins department of public health administration from 1962 to 1969, when he joined the medical faculty of the State University of New York in Brooklyn, N.Y., and later New York University's Graduate School of Public Administration.

IF YOU are a "risk-taker," here are suggestions from Financial Perspectives: "Expect downturns; realize that the market doesn't climb indefinitely; take only enough risk to achieve certain goals -- college education, comfortable retirement, etc. Most of the time, that requires only modest returns compounded over many years -- not exceptionally high returns crammed into a few years."Are you a "small-cap" investor? Michael Fasciano, mutual fund manager, says, "I look for companies whose sales and earnings increased steadily over three to five years, whose price-earnings ratios are below their growth rates, and companies I can hold for many years.

WASHINGTON - -Google chief economist Hal Varian is pretty confident the national economy is recovering, and he's not just basing that on government data. He says he can tell from Americans' search habits. In March, the number of Google users searching for information about unemployment benefits or employment centers began to drop, Varian said. Overall unemployment has continued to climb, of course, but new jobless claims have declined since peaking earlier this year. "As a contemporaneous predictor, predicting the present through search queries has been a pretty good predictor of initial (jobless)

STANLEY LEBERGOTT, 93 Economist who favored consumer culture Stanley Lebergott, 93, a retired economist and professor whose influential books and articles maintained that consumerism had brought positive changes to the American standard of living, died July 24 of cardiac arrest at his home in Middletown, Conn. Mr. Lebergott, a former government economist and Wesleyan University professor, took issue with those who disdained "consumerism" as wasteful, pointless, even immoral. Consumption, he maintained, has always been an expression of human longing rather than mere acquisitiveness.

Will American art-house moviegoers finally catch up to Chekhov? They didn't turn out in huge numbers even for Louis Malle's glorious Vanya on 42nd Street. Let's hope they show up in force for the Chekhovian comedy-drama Summer Hours. Writer-director Olivier Assayas' buoyant film about a French family in flux is based on an original script that's a cousin to Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. It may play better now than when it hit the festival circuit a year ago. Since we've gone from a period of rage and euphoria to one of wait and see, audiences may feel closer to the people in this film.

Even the sourpusses and Eeyores have lightened up. New York University economist Nouriel Roubini, who was talking about a "near depression" last fall and government takeovers of major banks as recently as April, now says "there is light at the end of the tunnel." Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said in speech last month that "GDP growth in the United States will be positive in the second half of the year," as if he had adjusted the fit of his underwear. Has the economy turned around?

WASHINGTON -The nation's unemployment rate surged to the highest level in a quarter-century last month and, despite signs that the economic crisis might be near bottoming out, hundreds of thousands more Americans are likely to lose their jobs in the months ahead. The pace of job losses is unprecedented in modern America. With 663,000 jobs eliminated in March alone, the unemployment rate jumped to 8.5 percent, its highest level since late 1983. The net job loss since the recession started at the end of 2007 climbed past 5 million.

University of Maryland economist Edward Montgomery has plenty of real-world experience, including a role in ending a Teamsters strike against UPS in 1997 while at the U.S. Department of Labor. He also has served as the No. 2 official at Labor with oversight of about 17,000 employees. But nothing could prepare him for the huge job he assumed Monday. President Barack Obama charged the 53-year-old Howard County resident with marshaling federal aid to bring relief to reeling communities in Michigan and other auto-producing states.

I was talking to a friend who is a travel agent, making plans to visit my son and his new wife this spring at their new Marine Corps duty station in California, and I asked if I should hold off buying my plane tickets in hopes that the prices will fall further. My friend said she'd watch prices for me but that I shouldn't wait too long. Prices will rise with demand, she said, and by spring she expected people to be traveling again. "We are going to be tired of saying we are poor," she predicted.

With jobs disappearing in numbers not seen since the end of World War II, pressure mounted on Congress and President-elect Barack Obama yesterday to reach agreement on a recovery program to stave off economic catastrophe. The nation's unemployment rate rose to an eye-popping 7.2 percent in December and brought the total jobs lost for the year to the largest number since 1945, the Labor Department said. More alarming than the bare numbers was the trend line: The economy lost 2.6 million jobs in 2008, but 1.9 million, or about 75 percent of them, vanished in the past four months.

Tumbling gasoline prices gave consumers more purchasing power last month, which led to a rise in real consumer spending even as personal income slips and Americans worry about their jobs in a rapidly weakening economy. The Commerce Department reported yesterday that consumer spending, when adjusted for inflation, rose 0.6 percent in November, its largest gain in two years. The increase followed a 0.5 percent decline in October. And while the unadjusted rate of consumer spending declined 0.6 percent in November, on the heels of a 1 percent drop in October, economists suggested that the relative increase in spending was a rare piece of good news for the faltering economy.

Home sales declined sharply last month, and housing prices posted their deepest decline in four decades as a rapidly slowing economy discouraged many potential buyers from tip-toeing into the market. Sales of existing homes declined 8.6 percent last month, to a seasonally adjusted rate of 4.49 million, according to the National Association of Realtors, a trade association. The median price of a home fell 13 percent in November, to $181,300 from $208,000 a year ago. That was the lowest price since February 2004.