Labor/Economy

Are there grounds for optimism about the European economy? Maybe in Ireland. The Irish economy posted a 1.6 percent quarterly GDP gain from the first to the second quarter of 2011.

According to the Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller home-price indexes released on Tuesday, U.S. home prices were up in July for the fourth month in a row.

New home sales dropped 2.3 percent from July to August to an annualized rate of 295,000 units, according to the U.S. Census Bureau on Monday.

Various Euro-zone policymakers, perhaps embarrassed that even the U.S. Treasury Secretary can take them to task for not dealing with their debt crisis any better than they have, met in Washington over the weekend to hash things out.

Wall Street was in full Chicken Little mode on Thursday, worried that the economic sky was falling. And maybe it is. No less an authority on economic conditions than the Federal Open Market Committee said in its Wednesday statement–along with something about the Twist–that there are “significant downside risks to the economic outlook,” which is Fed polite-ese for “don’t let the sky hit you on its way down.”

The International Monetary Fund released two reports on Tuesday, each pointing to the nervous exhaustion of the world economy and describing how things could get worse in a hurry.

At the Rose Garden on Monday, President Obama unveiled his plan to cut federal deficits, which was an exercise in demonstrating Pavlovian psychology as much as proposing economic policy.