The New Republic

This week anyone with a car is telling the same story: Where were you when you saw regular unleaded at less than $2 a gallon? (New Market, Virginia, in my case.) People are talking about it like they were Noah catching sight of Mt. Ararat--the flood of high prices is over. Except, well, it's not. According to a new report by the International Energy Agency, over the last year investment in oil and gas exploration has tanked, resulting in a $60 billion shortfall. The READ MORE >>

Momentarily doffing my business-beat hat, I want to highlight a strange article in the New York Times this morning. “For South, a Waning Hold on National Politics,” reads the headline, and the gist of the piece is that Southern voters, by backing McCain this election, have proven that their backward ways are increasingly irrelevant to the American scene. There are lots of good quotes from the usual suspects—Merle READ MORE >>

As Obama has made clear, bailing out the auto industry is a key priority in his economic recovery agenda. There’s already $25 billion in low-cost loans approved for Detroit, but that money is tagged specifically to help the industry retool to meet higher fuel-efficiency standards. So Democrats have been pushing the White House to tap the $700 billion bailout package for more. READ MORE >>

Obama will announce his Treasury secretary nomination in the next few days, and the safe bet is on Larry Summers or Timothy Geithner. But an almost equally important pick will be his SEC chair. After a remarkable period of reform under William Donaldson, the commission has languished under Chris Cox. To his credit, Cox didn’t do as much damage as people expected--he resisted efforts to de-regulate aggressively, at times clashing with the Commission’s free-market fanatic, Paul Atkins. But he was way behind the curve on the key issues, and he’s READ MORE >>

In case you get tired of reading election coverage, yesterday Edmund Phelps had a fascinating (if dense, to a lay reader) piece on the legacy of John Maynard Keynes in the Financial Times. After rolling out a compelling critique of the British economist, though, Phelps warns of efforts to revive Keynesianism in the wake of the financial crisis: READ MORE >>

 In case you needed any evidence, the credit crunch is now working full steam through the economy: U.S. manufacturing hits a 26-year-low, per the Washington Post, and car sales are at their lowest in 25 years, per the Financial Times. READ MORE >>

Following on the heels of an optimistic piece in the New York Times about green jobs in the Rust Belt comes a Financial Times report that investors are fleeing the energy sector. This means less money to improve the country’s ailing power infrastructure, and probably even less to push into renewable READ MORE >>

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Let’s hope yesterday’s half-point rate cut worked. At 1 percent, the Fed can’t go much lower. Technically, of course, it can go to 0 percent, then try alternatives, like targeting the rate at monthly or yearly periods, instead of overnight. But even the current rate is a historic low, and pulling out even bigger guns would probably take a renewed crisis to justify. Going further could even spark a renewed panic itself if investors felt the Fed was going overboard READ MORE >>

Time was, a major upward swing in the market followed by a half-point cut by the Fed would send American investors on a buying spree. But that time has probably passed. Today Ben Bernanke and Co. are expected to make another interest-rate cut, but market futures were trending down nonetheless. Is that because they don’t expect it to do much? Because they’re withdrawing from yesterday’s frenzy? Or are they reacting to the renewed READ MORE >>