Still good news: U.S. Economy Grew at 2.2%

GDP revised slightly downward. Bloomberg: U.S. Economy Grew at 2.2% Annual Rate Last Quarter

The 2.2 percent increase in gross domestic product from July through September compares with a 2.8 percent gain previously reported by the Commerce Department in Washington.

Improved consumer spending combined with a record drop in stockpiles this year will promote increases in production that may keep the world’s largest economy growing well into 2010. At the same time, companies such as Dell Inc. point to gains in business investment that signal growing confidence the expansion will continue.

“We are really starting to see the mechanisms for a sustained recovery come into place,” said Robert Dye, a senior economist at PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh. “We are starting to see investment numbers come back.”

R.I.P. Paul Samuelson

Paul Samuelson has died at the age of 94. Ed Glaeser:

He was an immortal among dismal scientists: one of the mighty trio, along with Kenneth Arrow and Milton Friedman, who dominated post-war economics, the great formalizer of the field.

Friedman’s policy insights may have been more radical and significant; Arrow’s genius may have produced more beautiful gems of economic theory. But it was Samuelson who gave economists our toolbox — the mathematical methods that define our field — and the magnitude of that gift made him an indispensible economist.

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