Looking for Good News? He Has Plenty

Sure, the stock market has been climbing. But America has a gaping budget deficit, few companies are hiring, the pace of house foreclosures is expected to quicken next year and savers must choose between the faltering dollar and worrisome prices for most investment classes.

Who at a time like this would publish a blog called PositiveEconomicNews.com? And why?

Curiosity recently got the better of me after I noticed the site during a Google search, so I made a phone call. First, though, I put together a quick profile in my head. Most likely male, I figured, because female economists, even today, seem curiously rare. Either young or rich or both, I guessed, because most midlife members of the middle class seem too busy with their bills for idealism. I was sure our blog author was politically polarized: either an Obama-can-do-no-wrong Democrat or a free-markets-will-solve-everything Republican. And I knew he wasn’t from my town, leery New York City.

In fact, Barry Lauterwasser, 45, is a longtime resident of Louisville, Ky. He’s “by no means rich,” although the house where he lives with his wife Leslie and two teenage kids is almost paid off. During last year’s presidential election he voted Democrat for the first time in his life. He thinks the president is doing the right things to fix the economy, but says John McCain probably would have done the right things, too.

Lauterwasser started PositiveEconomicNews.com two years ago after what for most of us would have been a pretty negative event. He lost his job as a marketer for an online publishing company. Downsizing. Watching the news at home, though, he began to feel the media was going out of its way to report negative stories, and to report them in negative ways, like using the word “plummet” to describe a 3% drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. “If I lost 3% of my bodyweight, I wouldn’t say my weight had plummeted,” he says.

So he began seeking out positive stories and posting links. Did you hear that Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) tripled the size of its stock buyback plan? Also, gross domestic product is growing again. The Chicago Federal Reserve Bank chief thinks the unemployment rate is almost done rising. Indeed, the number of U.S. planned layoffs has fallen for three straight months. And by the way, the media has turned a bit more chipper, based on a Dow Jones index that analyzes the text of 15 major newspapers. Naturally, Lauterwasser reported the good news on his site.

“I’m no Pollyanna,” he says. “More optimism wouldn’t have stopped the downturn. But too much pessimism can make it worse. I think the country is a lot stronger and a lot more resilient than people think.”

I wondered what’s in it for him. Not much, it turns out. The site attracts more readers when the stock market falls than when it rises, but not enough to make money from in either case. Readers can buy shirts, mugs and ball caps with the site’s rising-trend-line logo and the words “Keep It Positive.” Revenue to date: $75. But posting upbeat news is just a hobby, Lauterwasser says. He has gone back to work—for himself, this time—offering marketing services to mostly forklift companies, calling on contacts he made in a past job in the forklift industry. A year in, his income is half what he was making before losing his job. As you might expect, he sees his glass as half full: “For a recession, the new business is going great.” He says it helps that Leslie works as a nurse and that they’ve saved and invested and have long lived below their means, driving a Camry and splurging modestly on a once-a-year trip to Jamaica. He wonders how many laid-off workers will start businesses like him only to end up happier and more prosperous in coming years.

I wish I could agree with Lauterwasser’s take on the economy. I think the government is spending far too much money, and is spending in ways that reward borrowers and punish savers at a time more Americans should be saving. I worry that stimulus efforts will merely bloat asset prices for a short while at great cost to taxpayers. Lauterwasser, who freely admits his experience is in marketing and not economics, says this isn’t the first time the government has borrowed and spent huge sums to revive the economy and that we’ve come back before. “I’m not a big proponent of government spending, but if it’s done sensibly, the spending can put people back to work,” he says.

One of history’s most successful investors seems to side with Lauterwasser, I can’t help but notice. “A terrible market or a terrible economy is your friend,” Warren Buffett said recently at a New York forum. He has busily put cash to work for Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) over the past year. Last quarter he spent $26 billion to fully own U.S. railroad Burlington Northern and he topped up positions in Nestle and Wal-Mart (WMT). In a recent meeting with University of Akron students, Buffett compared stimulus spending with medicating an ill patient. “It’s the right thing to do, but there will be many side effects,” he said. He credited both the Bush and Obama administrations and especially the Fed with handling the crisis well.

My encounter with a Kentucky optimist hasn’t fully converted me. I’m still worried. But I’m going to make sure my end-of-year planning involves turning worry into action—more saving, humbler living, better investing, harder work. I’m not sure I can keep it positive. But I can keep it productive and give good news its due.