Reasons To be Cheerful # 0001

Per Felix Salmon

The Baltic Dry Index, which measures international shipping costs, was fixed today at 2,503, down 9% on the day and down 79% from its May high of 11,793. It's a volatile index, and these levels are hardly unprecedented: the index was below 3,000 for a good year from mid-May 2005 onwards.

He wrote that on Thursday, and the index fell by another 200+ points on Friday.

This, like the falling oil price, is much-needed good news for the world economy. The level of shipping costs, some people were saying, had become a more important obstacle to world trade than tariff levels.

Recession=Innovation Deficit

This is interesting.

It is not really news that a focus on the source of job losses is a waste of attention, but I do not recall it being illustrated quite as well as in the labour market statistics quoted by David Leonhardt in this New York Times article. What the data over 14 years appear to show is that what happens in a slow-down is not that more jobs are lost but that less jobs are created.

Hat-tip:The Economist's "Free Exchange" online-column.