Economy picking up

Corporations from AT&T to U.P.S. say business is finally picking up -- and investors are cheering.

Robust quarterly results from some of the nation’s bellwether companies galvanized Wall Street on Thursday. Stocks soared in a broad rally that lifted the Dow Jones industrial average more than 200 points.

Big names like AT&T, Caterpillar, U.P.S. and 3M posted surprisingly strong sales and profit figures for the second quarter. Even more encouraging, many also issued upbeat forecasts for the rest of the year, suggesting that, for them at least, a recovery of sorts was at last taking hold.

Strong Economic Data Stokes Optimism in Britain and Germany

This is good news but something still needs to be done to get unemployment down quickly. I sympathize with other progressives' tendency to hype bad news and ignore good news in order to give weight to their policy prescriptions but we need to be accurate.

It's always easy to spin data politically one way or the other. For instance the Obama administration can now say, "Look, we haven't frightened the business community with our reforms of the health care and financial sectors. In fact our actions have encouraged business and will help to create jobs."