Economist

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)

A measure of U.S. mortgage applications rose last week as a drop in borrowing costs helped lure homebuyers. Refinancing declined for the sixth week in the past seven. The Mortgage Bankers Association said its gauge of loan demand increased 0.1 percent to 601.2. The purchase index rose 1.1 percent last week to 454.5 and remains close to the record 501.6 reached in January. The creation of 1.2 million jobs so far this year, income growth and 30-year fixed-mortgage rates about 1.2 percentage points from a record low have underpinned home sales.

AN ADVOCATE of intervention to assure competitiveness would demand breaking up the University of Chicago department of economics, much as they did the 1927 Yankees, to give others a chance. Chicago economists have won 21 percent of Nobel Prizes for Economics since the prize was instituted in 1969. That's eight in all, five of the ten given in the past six years.Other economists have argued that attempts to regulate monetary or fiscal policies based on interventionist theories associated with John Maynard Keynes may not work.

Nathaniel M. Pigman Jr., a retired statistician and teacher, died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and congestive heart failure Oct. 15 at the Gilchrist Hospice Care in Columbia. He was 92 and had lived in Columbia and Edgewater. Born in Bremerton, Wash., he moved with his father, who served in the Navy, throughout the Pacific area as a child. He earned a bachelor of arts at the University of Virginia, where he also attended law school and was admitted to the Virginia Bar. Family members said he never practiced.

Held back by debt accumulated during the 1980s, the economy will recover slowly next year, but will not return to its normal level until after the middle of the year, according to an economist for T. Rowe Price Associates Inc."Consumers are cautious, business people are nervous, and the federal government is not helping out," said Paul W. Boltz, vice president and financial economist for Price, the Baltimore-based mutual-fund and investment services firm.His prediction was in prepared remarks to be delivered today in New York at Price's annual news briefing and luncheon.

Though the United States has clearly dropped into recession, government moves forced by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks virtually guarantee that the downturn will be milder than that of 1990-1991, a local think tank's chief economist predicted yesterday. Maryland should suffer less than it did in the last recession and benefit more from the rebound, added Anirban Basu, chief economist at RESI Research & Consulting, a Towson University think tank. The promised infusion of billions by the federal government, in tandem with the central bank's aggressive interest-rate-cutting campaign, should shorten the recession and hasten the rebound this time around, he said.

Johns Hopkins economist Steve Hanke has built a reputation as a monetary and economic repairman in countries ranging from Bulgaria to Argentina. Now he's working on his most prominent case yet.In a sign that troubled Indonesia is seriously considering linking its battered currency to the U.S. dollar, Hanke met with Indonesian President Suharto on Monday to explain a monetary system that he has promoted in several other developing countries.Called a currency board, the scheme guarantees exchange of a developing country's money for dollars or some other anchor currency at a fixed rate.

NEW YORK -- When supereconomist Allen Sinai went to ren the remake of "Cape Fear" from his nearby video rental store, he discovered he'd have to wait three months to see the blockbuster movie. But rather than getting angry, Mr. Sinai realized that he'd hit on another of his patented colorful examples of what is happening to the U.S. economy."People are spending less and saving more. Rather than go out to a movie, they're making popcorn and sitting at home," Mr. Sinai said yesterday at his 10th annual economic forecast, which has become a fixture on the economic calendar.

Arnold H. Packer, an economist who helped write "Workforce 2000," a groundbreaking 1987 study that heralded dramatic changes in the work force as the baby boom aged, is forming a Baltimore-based commission to persuade schools and employers across the nation to reform worker training.After two years as head of a U.S. Department of Labor commission that proposed fundamental changes in education, Mr. Packer has joined the staff of the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Policy Studies as a senior fellow.