If you pay taxes, here's a helpful story that suggests that there are people out there actually looking after your and your clients' interests. The article is by Mark Pittman, James Sterngold, and Hugh Son from Bloomberg News. It's about the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and its efforts to determine whether taxpayers are being well served by the massive amount of public aid to AIG AIG and its counterparties when the firm nearly collapsed last year. I was happy to see the work of the committee and its chairman, Edolphus Towns, a Democrat from New York. I've also been happy to watch Bloomberg's coverage of this material over the past year or so. It's nice to see examples of the Fourth Estate doing its job.   

Yesterday, we criticized The Wall Street Journal for highlighting extremely negative mortgage statistics from Zillow.com. Only at the end of the article did the writer mention that other sources of mortgage data were seeing less drastic changes.  Our point at the time was that the paper was highlighting the more dramatic and negative number. I also commented that the magnitude of the jump struck me as being highly unusual. It turns out that Zillow.com had given the wrong data to the Journal, which posted a correction on A2 of today's paper.   More 

We have noticed lately that a lot of economic data is getting published that shouldn't, at least not without setting some type of context or some analysis. We first noticed the trend several months ago when the media breathlessly claimed that initial unemployment claims were at their worst levels since World War II and conveniently forgot to mention that the U.S. population was also now greater than it was in 1945. In fact, the U.S. population has more than doubled. Then, even worse in our mind, once the weekly initial claims for unemployment starting turning less ominous about a month ago, the media began focusing on continuing claims report, which is released on a one-week delayed basis and is much more of a lagging indicator than initial claims.   More