It’s been a bad 36 hours or so for American economic declinists. Twitter’s initial public offering demonstrated the ability of the American entrepreneurial engine to create an entity worth $20 billion essentially from scratch. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage-giant basket cases that were the ne plus ultra of the 2008 financial debacle, requiring an injection of $180 billion putatively irretrievable taxpayer funds, said Thursday they’d return to Treasury $8.6 billion and $30.4 billion, respectively, essentially making the taxpayers whole on the bailout, when they reported quarterly profits. Meanwhile, it turns out that the economy chugged ahead in the summer. The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the economy grew at a 2.8 percent rate in the third quarter. On Friday, the same agency reported that personal income and savings both rose at impressive rates in September.
But the most impressive report was Friday morning’s jobs report, which gave us one of the first reads on how the economy preformed in October, a month in which the government shut down and a threat of default sandbagged demand and threw sand into the economic gears. And still it turned out the economy performed pretty well. In October, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. added an impressive 204,000 payroll jobs.
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