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President Bush's top economic adviser is leaving his post to return to academia, the White House announced Wednesday. N. Gregory Mankiw, the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, wrote Bush a letter of resignation dated Feb. 9. "It is time for me to return to my family, my students and my books," the former Harvard University professor wrote in the letter that also praised Bush's economic policies.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. industrial output grew strongly last month while producer prices fell at the sharpest rate in 1-1/2 years amid tumbling energy prices, according to reports suggesting healthy, noninflationary growth. U.S. factories, mines and utilities boosted production by a more-than-expected 0.8 percent in December, leading to a 4.1 percent gain for all of 2004, the best annual showing in four years, a Federal Reserve report showed on Friday. Separately, the Labor Department said producer prices dropped 0.7 percent last month, a sharper-than-expected decline and the biggest since April 2003. Prices were also well contained when excluding volatile food...

Friday’s job report shows that White House economist Greg Mankiw was very nearly right when he projected almost a year ago that jobs could rise by 2.6 million in 2004. Of course, he was widely ridiculed inside Washington after making this statement, and at one point even the White House turned its back on the Harvard professor’s estimate. But the Labor Department’s latest employment release shows the yearly gain for nonfarm payrolls coming in at 2.3 million. That’s close enough for government work. It’s also the best jobs performance in five years. Why so good? The labor market responded powerfully...

Bush taps Kellogg Co. CEO Gutierrez to head Commerce Corbett B. Daly WASHINGTON (CBS.MW) -- President Bush announced Monday that Carlos Gutierrez, Kellogg Co.'s chief executive, would replace Don Evans as Commerce Secretary, making the first of what are expected to be many changes in his economic team. "Carlos Gutierrez is one of America's most respected business leaders," Bush said at the official announcement in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. (...) Gutierrez, 51, has been CEO at Battle Creek, Mich.-based Kellogg (K) since April 1999. Kellogg shares fell 51 cents immediately after news broke that the cereal maker...

President Bush plans to overhaul his economic team for the second time in two years and wants to tap prominent figures outside the administration to help sell rewrites of Social Security and the tax laws to Congress and the country, White House aides and advisers said over the weekend. The aides said the replacement of four of the five top economic officials -- including the Treasury and Commerce secretaries, with only budget director Joshua B. Bolten likely to remain -- is part of Bush's preparation for sending Congress an ambitious second-term domestic agenda.

New claims slid 12,000 to 323,000 in the week ended Nov. 20. Economists expected little change. The 4-week average, which smooths out weekly swings, slid 6,500 to 332,000, the lowest in four years. Continuing claims fell 25,000 to 2.755 mil in the week ended Nov. 13 to a 3 1/2-year low. The data signal companies may be less reluctant to hire. More

Outsourcing: Threat or Menace? by Don Luskin (May 9, 2004) Summary: But it's only under a policy of do-nothing economic freedom that we can maximize our chances to find the thing we're good at doing instead of making cheese, steel, or even wine. [www.CapitalismMagazine.com] Speech by Donald L. Luskin to the Corporate Finance Council of San Diego. Tonight I'm going to be talking about the controversy over "offshore outsourcing" in the context of a book I'm writing. My book is about the intersection of the science of economics, the power of government, and the influence of the mass media. The...

Reluctantly, Republicans have concluded that the outsourcing issue is not going away. Their first response was to shoot the messenger--in this case, Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Greg Mankiw, who simply said the phenomenon is an inevitable byproduct of free trade. House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) called for his head and Mankiw was forced to apologize. Journalist Robert Novak called the White House action "clumsy." With polls showing growing numbers of Americans apprehensive that their jobs may soon be sent to China or India, Republicans eventually recognized that a more appropriate response was needed. According to a March 21 poll...

When I started working in journalism, strips of copy had to be physically cut and pasted onto boards, which were then photographed to make printing plates. Today, thanks to cheap, powerful computers and desktop publishing software, this whole process is handled electronically: Instead of assembling and transporting boards, you create and transmit files. The shift to electronic composing has reduced the manpower, time and cost involved in putting together a publication. At the same time, it has eliminated all the jobs associated with literal cutting and pasting. Was that fair? The question can't really be answered, and the reason goes...

Although Democratic presidential front-runner John Kerry often rails on the campaign trail against U.S. companies that relocate jobs abroad, seeking lower tax and wage rates, federal records show that the Massachusetts senator is heavily invested in such companies and has recently received substantial support from some of their top executives. Campaign finance reports reviewed by The Hill reveal that employees at 25 companies identified by CNN’s Lou Dobbs as “either sending American jobs overseas, or choosing to employ cheap overseas labor, instead of American workers,” have contributed more than $370,000 to Kerry’s presidential campaign. On receiving an endorsement from the...

<p>That was quite a brouhaha over the common-sense remarks of Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Mr. Mankiw rightly observed earlier this month that "outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade," whose wealth-creating and living-standard-raising benefits have been indisputable for centuries. Unfortunately, all the attention given to the-gaffe-that-wasn't overwhelmed the consideration that should have been given to the contextual tutorial that Mr. Mankiw and his council colleagues provided in their examination of the U.S. manufacturing sector. It appears as Chapter 2 in the 2004 Economic Report of the President (ERP).</p>

A White House wonk says building a Big Mac is a manufacturing job. Fast-food jobs should not be considered service sector work because it actually is "combining inputs to manufacture a product" - and should be reclassified as manufacturing work, Gregory Mankiw wrote in the Bush administration's annual economic report. Democrats accused President Bush's chief economist of trying to mask the fact that 2.2 million high-wage jobs have been lost since Bush took office. "Unable to stop the hemorrhaging of American manufacturing jobs, the Bush administration is offering up some world-class job creation sleight of hand: Change the definition of...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. Gregory Mankiw, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, triggered a political firestorm when he told the Joint Economic Committee of Congress (JEC) on February 10 that outsourcing jobs is “just a new way of doing international trade.” Yet, he was correct in his assessment. It was his total lack of concern about the consequences that provoked even the Republican Speaker of the U.S. House, Dennis Hastert of Illinois, to respond, “I understand that Mr. Mankiw is a brilliant economic theorist, but his theory fails a basic test of real economics.”...

Outsourcing to other countries has become a hot political issue in America. Contrary to what John Edwards, John Kerry and George Bush seem to think, it actually sustains American jobs EARLIER this month, President George Bush's chief economic adviser, Gregory Mankiw, once Harvard's youngest tenured professor, attracted a storm of abuse. He told Congress that if a thing or a service could be produced more cheaply abroad, then Americans were better off importing it than producing it at home. As an example, Mr Mankiw uses the case of radiologists in India analysing the X-rays, sent via the internet, of American...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Thursday struggled anew to contain the fallout over an overly optimistic forecast that 2.6 million jobs will be created this year and some Republicans expressed concern about the damage being done to President Bush (news - web sites). The chairman of Bush's re-election campaign, Marc Racicot, continued a general Bush administration retreat by saying the forecast of 2.6 million jobs was only a "stated goal." "It was a theoretical discussion by an economist," he told NBC's "Today" show. White House spokesman Scott McClellan called it "a snapshot in time by economic forecasters." Since...

Two recent stories illustrate why even seemingly intelligent politicians speak in short, dumbed-down sound bytes. One story has to do with the peak of political power; the other concerns lowly me. Let's start at the peak. Last week, N. Gregory Mankiw, the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisors, made the following sensible statement on globalized trade in testimony to Congress as part of introducing this year's Economic Report of the President: Outsourcing of professional services is a prominent example of a new type of trade ... When a good or service is produced at lower cost in another...

WASHINGTON — The movement of American factory jobs and white-collar work to other countries is part of a positive transformation that will enrich the U.S. economy over time, even if it causes short-term pain and dislocation, the Bush administration said yesterday. The embrace of foreign "outsourcing," an accelerating trend that has contributed to U.S. job losses in recent years and has become an issue in the 2004 elections, is contained in the president's annual report to Congress on the U.S. economy. "Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade," said N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of Bush's Council of...

HARRISBURG, Pa. (Reuters) - Under pressure from fellow Republicans, President Bush distanced himself on Thursday from one of his top economic advisers who said the outsourcing of U.S. jobs to workers overseas may benefit the economy. "The (economic) numbers are good. But I don't worry about numbers, I worry about people," Bush told students and teachers at a high school in Pennsylvania -- a pivotal state in this year's election and one of the hardest hit by factory job losses during his presidency. Without mentioning by name the chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, Gregory Mankiw, Bush said he...

Outsourcing remarks by White House advisor stir backlash By Edward Alden and Christopher Swann in Washington Published: February 12 2004 21:42 | Last Updated: February 12 2004 21:42 Gregory Mankiw, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, thought he was stating the obvious when he said this week that the movement of some US service jobs to places such as India and China was "just a new way to do international trade". "More things are tradable than were tradable in the past," he said on Monday in releasing an upbeat forecast predicting about 3m new jobs in...

Bush's economic advisor under fire for defending outsourcing to India 22.37 IST 12th Feb 2004 By IndiaExpress Bureau A key economic advisor to President George W Bush has come in for sharp criticism by both Democrats and Republicans for defending outsourcing of IT jobs to countries like India. Gregory Mankiw, Bush's Council of Economic Advisors' Chairman and noted Harvard economist, was attacked by the Speaker of the House of Representatives J Dennis Hastert and Democratic Presidential hopeful Senator John F Kerry for suggesting that outsourcing to India and other countries in which they have a comparative advantage is a "win-win"...