Via Irwin, THE SECRET OF OUR UNSUNG ECONOMIC BOOM
Yet over the last six months the S&P 500 has returned about 12%. That’s just six months, and it’s a bigger return than stocks have had historically in the average full year.
Since the official end of the last recession, in November 2001, the S&P 500 is up 24%. Why isn’t that a bull market?
Over the same period, real GDP has grown 15%. At the rate of economic growth we logged in the first quarter of this year, our country grows the equivalent of an entire Australia every year. Worried about high oil prices? At this rate our GDP growth in a single year is three times the value of the entire economy of Iran, oil, nukes and all.
4 million payroll jobs have been created since the recession bottom. The unemployment rate has fallen from 5.5% to 4.7%. Federal income tax receipts are at an all time high. Home ownership is at an all time high. Household net worth is at an all time high. Per capita disposable income is at an all time high.
Read it all.
Today’s articles from Maria
Are You A Workaholic? If you are, you probably don’t have time to read the book where the quiz came from.
In other news,
Via LGF, Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, a dual Syrian-Spanish national who is a top al-Qaida leader whose links stretch from Osama bin Laden’s training camps to extremist networks in Europe has been captured in Pakistan
Also via LGF, The BBC fails to always give a “full and fair account” of the Israeli Palestinian conflict, but claims that “is not deliberately biased”. Does that mean they are accidentally biased?
Argentina, Brazil and Spain aren’t too happy that Evo nationalized the Bolivian oil industry.
The UK Times does get too cute in calling Evo “Señor Morales”, and should expect Spanish-language newspapers to correspond in kind and refer to Prime Minister Blair as “Don Tony”.
Another Airbus crash. In France, Six people went on trial in eastern France on Tuesday on charges of manslaughter over the 1992 crash of an Airbus airliner in which 87 people died. Crashes like those, and like the November 2001, over the Rockaways, have pilots asking for an investigation.
Keith Richards ‘has brain haemorrhage’ after tree fall. Sometimes, climbing up a 20′ tall palm tree isn’t such a good idea.
(technorati tags not posted since Technorati’s down)