Economist

The proposed Washington compromise on tax cuts and extending unemployment benefits will pump billions more in federal dollars into Maryland's and Howard County's economy, a prominent local economist says, but the bill for that short-term gain will eventually come due. "To me, this is quite bad news for Maryland," Anirban Basu of Sage Policy Group told more than 200 local business leaders gathered at an annual Howard County Chamber of Commerce economic...

The Baltimore metro area saw average home prices rise faster in June than any other time in the past three years, but economists warned that the pickup is likely temporary — fueled by buyers rushing to beat a deadline to qualify for federal tax credits. Sale prices rose 5 percent compared with a year earlier, pushing the average for the metro area above $300,000 for the first time in months, according to figures released Friday by Rockville-based Metropolitan Regional Information Systems.

When businesses fail, we profs show up like buzzards at roadkill. It's not that we enjoy others' suffering; our hope is to glean insights that might keep our students from producing the next Lehman Brothers, General Motors, or … Baltimore Orioles. True, the O's aren't bankrupt, and they're not very economically important. The value of the entire U.S. sports industry is less than the federal government spent to bail out AIG a couple of years ago. But sports data are detailed and public, so it's easy to learn from them — and because we care passionately about our sports teams, the lessons learned might actually stick.

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?

Job losses in Maryland slowed in April with unemployment dipping slightly to 6.8 percent, but economists cautioned it's too early to hope for a recovery. The state's jobless rate, adjusted for seasonal changes, fell to 6.8 percent in April, according to preliminary figures released Friday by the U.S. Department of Labor. That's compared with 6.9 percent in March, a nearly 17-year-high. "The important thing is job gains and losses," said Charles W. McMillion, president and economist at MBG Information Services in Washington, noting the dip in the state's rate is likely a seasonal fluctuation.

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.