Structure of Macroeconomic News Analysis

¶ … Home prices rose in June, and confidence is climbing. Retrieved October 12, 2013 from The New York Times website: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/28/business/economy/gauges-of-home-prices-and-consumer-confidence-rise.html In this article, the author examines the economy by looking at consumer confidence and home prices. They concluded that both measures of the economy showed an improvement. In June, home prices had risen 12.1% from a year prior, which placed near a seven-year market, though there were signs that the market was cooling.

Consumer confidence approached a five and a half year high, rising to 81.5 in August, as did consumer income expectations. Concepts The two broad macroeconomic concepts examined in this article were housing prices and consumer confidence. Consumer confidence is related to a broad overview of economic health because of the idea that confident consumers tend to spend more money. The more money people spend, the greater the stimulating impact on the economy. Therefore, consumer confidence is supposed to predict greater spending and a stronger economy.

Likewise, housing prices are a good predictor of the economy. For most Americans, homes are their primary means of investment. When housing markets plunge, the real net worth of many Americans plummets as well. Conversely, when housing prices rise, individual net worth rises. Implications The overall message contained in the article was that the economy had shown significant improvement over at least a five-year time period, and that, while there was some evidence that the growth was slowing, the changes continued to occur. Article Singer, N. (2013, October 5).

Deciding who sees students' data. Retrieved October 12, 2013 from The New York Times website: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/business/deciding-who-sees-students-data.html?src=me Summary The article discusses InBloom, a nonprofit corporation that is focused on how to collect and disseminate information from school districts in a way that makes access easier and improves the security of data.

Parents were concerned about the implementation of the data storage means because of the lack of administrative rules regarding who in the district could access the data, as well as a lack of restrictions on sharing the information. InBloom also only provides part of the service; it provides the storage, but not the end-user software that would make it possible to store the data. However, because it has 400 possible data fields, it seems to encourage the collection of a significant amount of data.

InBloom, a nonprofit corporation based in Atlanta, seemed to offer a solution: it could collect information from the district's many databases and store it in the cloud, making access easier, and protect it with high-level encryption Analysis Concepts Because this article focused on data storage rather than any real financial concerns, it does not appear to implicate any real macroeconomic concepts. However, the reality is that data storage has become a critical part of the business world.

Data has become a good in terms of goods and services from a macroeconomic basis, and data storage has become and critical service. The economic implications from the potential sale of that data are critical. Even more critical are the possible economic implications from the theft of that data. Implications This article focused on a single school district's decision to implement the InBloom system and how.