More on the Deepwater Horizon

From Peter Coy and Stanley Reed in Bloomberg:

Should the heaviest portion of the spill come ashore, it may cause damage rivaling the 1989 wreck of the Exxon Valdez in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, despoiling the breeding grounds of species in the fragile coastal-buffer zone that provides hurricane protection.

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Nonfarm Payroll Employment: The Tide Has Turned (For Now)

From the April 2010 employment situation release: Nonfarm payroll employment trends strongly upward; previous months’ figures are revised upward; not seasonally adjusted figures move upward as well; the upward movement is not driven by government employment; the experimental household based quasi-payroll employment series moves upward even more strongly; and aggregate hours is now 1% higher than the level at 2009M06.

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Euro Area to US Contagion?

I was wondering why the Reuters website wasn’t loading on my computer. Then I got a phone call from a reporter asking about the US stock market meltdown in response to Greece…which struck me as an odd linkage. It still strikes me as an odd linkage.

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Employment Bounceback?

Dobridge, Hooper and Slok in “Jobless Recovery III Seems Unlikely” Global Economic Perspectives (April 21, 2010) [not online]:

The sluggish performance of payroll employment and
jobless claims in recent months despite well-above-trend
growth in output has raised the specter of another jobless
recovery. …

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