That might have been a good question for reporters to address when they reported on the February trade data released yesterday. The data showed that royalties and licensing fees had increased by $883 million from January, a rise of more than 40 percent.

This has occasionally happened in prior months and presumably reflects one-time payments to a producer or set of producers. However, this was a big part of the $2.8 billion rise in the overall trade deficit from January and it deserved some mention in the coverage of the February data.

--Dean Baker

A new Pew poll of reporters and editors found a great deal of pessimism about the prospects for the newspaper industry. At one point, the article reports the poll's finding that: "about three-quarters of the editors who took part said they would have serious objections to accepting direct support from either the government or interest groups, and a similar number said their organizations had not seriously thought about taking donations from nonprofit groups."

Paul Krugman asks in his column this morning why Texas managed to largely escape the worst of the housing bubble while Georgia leads the country in the number of failed banks. Both are states in which the major cities have relatively few zoning restrictions or natural barriers, which allows for easy sprawl to meet new housing demand. Krugman explains the difference by the better consumer protection legislation in Texas.

The NYT notes that interest rates have recently risen and are generally predicted to continue to rise. It then told readers: "That, economists say, is the inevitable outcome of the nation’s ballooning debt and the renewed prospect of inflation as the economy recovers from the depths of the recent recession."

We need reporters to do this? In the course of the report NPR assured listeners that there was nothing that could be done about AIG's explosive issuance of credit default swaps (CDS) because it was an insurance company that operates in hundreds of countries. And furthermore, the federal government doesn't even regulate insurance, states do.

The Washington Post (a.k.a. Fox on 15th Street) told readers that: "Social Security is already draining resources from the broader federal budget, as spending on benefits has risen above this year's Social Security tax collections."

The NYT reports that China's government signed a deal with the state of California and General Electric to provide engineering expertise and high tech parts for the construction of high-speed rail. This is a fascinating and totally predictable story which cause great pain to many purveyors of the economic conventional wisdom (CW).

China has been building high-speed trains, the United States hasn't. This means that the country has substantially more expertise in this area than the United States. As a result the transfer of this green technology will go from China to the United States, the opposite direction assumed by purveyors of the CW.