Boxing Day blogging - - Jay Powell's wonderful Christmas present and a test for American journalists

 From Mike Konczal:

 

You are going to hear a lot of buts and qualifiers downplaying this news, but barring a major downward revision in the numbers, we have achieved the mythical soft landing with strong GDP growth, low unemployment, and an inflation rate below what we had when Joe Biden took office. No one knows if the good times will continue but happily ever after was never part of the definition. Jay Powell's Fed policy and Joe Biden's economic policy have managed to pull something off that almost all economists were telling us was impossible as recently as one year ago.

Based on any reasonable and consistent standard for newsworthiness, this should be getting huge headlines. Will it get them? 

Maybe...

And maybe not...

(and, yes, I am saying that the  New York Times is more reluctant to publish good news for Biden than the Wall Street Journal is, at least if we leave out the WSJ opinion page.)

When it comes to misperceptions about the economy, the United States is not just terribly misinformed, it is uniquely misinformed. (From the Financial Times)

 

 This is an issue of potentially catastrophic political implications and while there are probably three or four major causes, journalists have to bear a substantial part of the blame here. There are a handful of exceptions, the Los Angeles Times, American Public Media's Marketplace, TPM, individuals like John Harwood, but overall coverage of the economy has gone from alarmist and sensationalistic about the rise in inflation to far, far quieter about its impressive drop, while stories about shockingly good employment numbers and a decline in things like the racial wealth Gap  were pushed below the fold.

One of the great unquestioned truisms of journalism is that the unexpected and unusual is newsworthy. Man bites dog is the standard shorthand. But in 2023, we saw one of the most expectation-defying economic stories of the past hundred plus years, in terms of good news, most unexpected. The soft landing was perhaps the ultimate cryptid of economics , what we've described before as a Yeti and a Sasquatch riding a Loch Ness Monster , and while it was happening, many major developments were given less coverage than a literal dog bites man story.