Thanks to Nell Henderson of the WaPo for alerting us to this video in a story in yesterday’s Business section.

As most of you (OK, some of you) know, Ben Bernanke is the new Alan Greenspan, the new Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Rumor had it that former White House economic adviser Glenn Hubbard was also in the hunt for the job, but ultimately was not selected. Hubbard is currently the dean of Columbia’s Business School.

Well, those zany B-school types got together and did a music video spoof of a faux Hubbard singing to the tune of the Police’s “Every breath You Take”, capturing his envy of Bernanke for being chosen over him. Here’s one stanza:

“First you move your lips
And hike a few more BiPS.
When demand then dips
And the yield curve flips,
I’ll be watching you.”

This apparently is the kind of stuff that sends economists and B-school students into hysteria, reaching for their Depends. Go figure.

So here’s the link to this wacky video of one economist singing a parody about another. And while you’re at it, here’s the link to Columbia B-School “Follies” Page which includes some other very funny clips, including a “Brokeback Mountain” send-up set in the world of Wall Street.

Enjoy!

Manufacturing outpaced the overall economy in 2005, though it experienced slower growth last year along with most sectors. Today, the Commerce Department released its annual report on GDP by Industry for 2005 which showed that manufacturing GDP increased a solid 4 percent last year in inflation-adjusted terms, or half a percentage point faster than the 3.5 percent pace of the overall economy.

Last year’s 3.5 percent rise in overall GDP was a deceleration from the 4.2 percent growth rate in 2004. While only two sectors (agriculture and mining) actually showed negative GDP growth last year, another seven experienced a deceleration in the pace of growth, including manufacturing, which increased by a stronger 4.8 percent in 2004. Only five sectors showed an acceleration in GDP growth last year (including education and health care, finance, construction and arts entertainment and recreation.)

Within manufacturing, most of the growth was in durable goods sectors, where GDP increased by 5.7 percent in 2005. Nondurable manufacturing grew a much slower 1.6 percent.

At $1.5 trillion, manufacturing made up 12 percent of the economy last year, virtually the same as 2004. This is the first time in 7 years that there was not significant erosion in manufacturing’s share of the economy. One of the reasons that manufacturing stabilized as a share of GDP last year is that for the first time in a decade, inflation in the manufactured sector did not decline in 2005, and instead rose modestly by 1.4 percent. In past years, deflation in manufacturing, along with sluggish growth surrounding the 2001 recession combined to reduce manufacturing’s share of GDP.

As in every year since 1987, manufacturing’s share of GDP was larger than every other private sector except FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) in 2005.

Yesterday the Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing at Stanford University held its Cool Products Expo. I was there and saw many of the remarkable inventions that have been developed. They are not all light years away, although the Space Elevator that we have blogged about before, seems a distant reality for those of us stuck in Internet Time. There is an iron that you can use for ironing your clothes that has built-in legs that pop up when your hand is not on the iron itself. There are cool new snow shoes that are ergonomically developed, espcially for women. Palm was there with their Treo and happy to show why is preferable to a Blackberry. How about a kid’s bike that doesn’t need training wheels and instead uses a gyroscope in the front wheel to help a kid stay balanced?! Ford had on display one of its cars with a fuel cell and GM showed off a hydrogen prototype.

The list went on and on and it was clearly a hit with Stanford students who seem to have thronged to the event. And unlike Capitol Hill events in DC, there was no free food and drink. They came because these budding engineers, scientists and business majors were truly interested in what American innovation is creating. Take a look at the website link above for more on these truly Cool Products.

Interesting editorial in today’s Washington Post, titled, “Phony War on Gas,” in which they discuss how the attacks on “price gouging” make good politics, but they don’t help consumers much.

The BIC is out of pocket right now, but he’ll provide further commentary later. As a starter, click here for our commentary on this topic from Tuesday and here for our follow up thoughts on Wednesday, both of which were pretty widely circulated ’round the blogosphere thanks to the folks at Powerline and also Glenn Reynolds.

This made its way to our desk this week from House Majority Leader John Boehner’s office. There are six questions which you should ask your Member of Congress. The original version was more partisan and so we’ve edited it a little bit, but the questions still struck us as the right ones to ask:

1. Will you support comprehensive solutions designed to lower prices by increasing the supply of American energy and expanding our energy infrastructure in America?

2. Will you support responsible legislation to increase domestic energy supplies?

3. Will you support legislation to expand clean nuclear energy supplies and the use of renewable fuels?

4. Will you support responsible legislation to streamline the process of refinery expansion and construction that is so critical to the future of America’s energy infrastructure?

5. Will you support legislation to put Americans to work producing more of our own American energy to lower prices?

6. What have you done to help ease the strain of rising energy costs?

As the message from Rep. Boehner’s (R-OH) office says, “Restricting the supply of American energy, opposing renewable alternatives, and driving up gas prices are the wrong answers to this question. The American people expect answers from their leaders.” For once, we couldn’t have said it any better. The radical environmental movement has had a stranglehold on this country’s energy policy for too long. Time for them to get out of the way.

Please click here to drop your elected representatives a note, see how many of these questions they get right. Tell them you want them to start lowering energy prices now. No more speeches.

Here’s a link to a floor statement by Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chair Pete Domenici (R-NM) yesterday on energy. He lays out the problem and the solution quite well, and says this:

“I stand here today and tell you that many of the [Senators] who have come down to the floor for the past two days to blame the President… for our energy prices, are the same [Senators] who have fought against the one thing they know will make a real impact on oil prices — increasing our own production.”

You know what to do. Click here to do it.

Let us be among the last to pile on in the maelstrom of press commentary about Tony Snow, newly-named White House spokesman. As anyone who knows Tony can attest, he is a great and smart guy with an easy manner and a great sense of humor, the latter of which will serve him well in this new assignment. He is well-known to the public and both well-known and well-liked by the press, a generally motley bunch not known for really liking anybody.

And so we say congratulations to Tony, wish him well in his new endeavor. It’s a great move for him and an even better one for the President, who is enduring some rough seas these days. If anyone can help get the message out, it’s Tony Snow.

Regular blog readers know we love to battle the trial bar and in almost every case, we side with the lowly and downtrodden employer, but this one is a little wacky:

A California woman sued her employer for $1.2 million in damages for being spanked. That’s right, spanked. We’ll let you find your own link to your preferred spanking site. Apparently one Mrs. Janet Orlando was the loser in a sales contest (we guess so!) between her company and a competitor. The winners of the contest, reports Julianna Barbassa in this AP story, “Poked fun at the losers, throwing pies at them, feeding them baby food, making them wear diapers and swatting their buttocks.” Crikey! What happened to good old fashioned firing?

Said Mrs. Orlando’s attorney, “No reasonable middle-aged woman would want to be put up there before a group of young men, turned around to show her buttocks, get spanked and called abusive names, and told it was to increase sales and motivate employees.” Why indeed would anyone want this kind of abuse at the office when they can get it at home? Or did we miss the point?

In any event, in an effort to keep both you regular blog readers up to date on the latest workplace trends, we wanted to let you know of this development. Might be time to write that “no spanking” policy into the manual.

Somebody has designated today as World Intellectual Property Day and our friends at the new Creative and Innovative Economy Center (CIEC) at George Washington Law School are marking the day with a Celebration of Creativity on Capitol Hill. Members of Congress are often thought of for their creative ways, but not always in the context of understanding and supporting intellectual property laws. So hats off to the House Caucus on the Promotion of Intellectual Property and the Prevention of Piracy which is hosting this really good event with CIEC.

The April 26 program will air a new Nigerian film, “Wetin Dey?” which is means “What’s Happening?” in Nigerian slang. The film involves some piracy issues so it should be a unique way to bring attention to piracy in film-making. Moreover, it is a good way to draw attention to the larger concerns about intellectual property that affect everything from pharmaceuticals to semiconductors. Drawing attention to IP problems is important for all manufacturers, as was made clear by President Bush in his remarks during President Hu’s visit to the United States last week.

We recently met Mike Ryan, head of CIEC and he graciously agreed to participate in The Manufacturing Institute’s roundtable last week on our new IP report: Intellectual Property for the Technological Age, by Professor Richard Epstein. This report is a celebration of IP every much as important as the Nigerian film. It lays out the reasons why today’s IP regime is important to the future of the US innovation economy, despite some of the quirks in IP legal cases. For those interested in the future of manufacturing, this is a good day to celebrate and the required reading for this event is Professor Epstein’s white paper.

If the current imbroglio over rising gas prices weren’t so serious in its consequences for average Americans, it would be almost comic to watch this all unfold. Watching the Congress react to this week’s “crisis” is nearly laughable.

As we laid out in this space yesterday, there are some very clear and logical reasons for the current high gas prices we now labor under. When all is stripped away, insufficient supply to meet escalating demand emerges as a key factor. So what has Congress done? In the last few days, a number of members of Congress and Senators have rushed to the microphone to offer their solutions.

In his response to the President’s Saturday Radio Address, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) urged every solution except tapping the Outer Continental Shelf off his home state. Fidel Castro can do it but we can’t. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) — reports the National Journal’s Congress Daily — plans to introduce a bill that will require energy market traders who trade electronically to keep records and provide them to federal officials if requested. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) will reportedly re-introduce a bill that would make price gouging a federal crime. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) is introducing a bill that would waive the federal gas tax for 60 days. The House Agriculture Committee has scheduled a hearing for this week on futures markets and gas prices.

Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Chris Dodd (D-CT) are planning on introducing a bill that will levy a 50% excise tax on any oil selling for more than $50 a barrel, reports the WaPo. Nevermind that our companies only control 13% of the oil supply, and that we pay a global price for oil. Will they levy this fee on Hugo Chavez? Vladimir Putin? Ah yes, the long arm of Congress….

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says, “Democrats have a commonsense plan to help bring down skyrocketing gas prices by cracking down on price gouging, rolling back the billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies, tax breaks and royalty relief given to big oil and gas companies, and increasing production of alternative fuels.”

OK — how’s that going….?

So here’s the lunacy of it all: According to the Minerals Management Service (MMS) at the US Department of Interior — a pretty well-respected group — there are 85.9 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Outer Continental Shelf. These are conservative estimates. Our experience in the Gulf of Mexico, in fact, reveals that the more we search for oil and gas, the more we find. Initial estimates of reserves in the Gulf were off by a factor of 10. If we tapped this oil in the OCS, we could meet the entire current US consumption of oil for a full 11 years without a drop of foreign oil. The natural gas could heat 210 million homes for 30 years. ANWR oil reserves are equal to all of Texas’ on-shore output.

As many commenters here and elsewhere have noted, supply and conservation are not mutually exclusive. In fact, quite the opposite. We need to conserve (manufacturers lead the way), we need to find new sources, too. But we absolutely need to be tapping these enormous reserves of energy. And, it all can be done in an environmentally-sensitive way.

And so we sit back and watch the Washington parlor game of finger pointing and misplaced blame. While they scurry about taxing this one and that one, and mandating electronic filing of whatever and railing against price gouging (talk about a safe issue — anybody in favor of price gouging?), we sit atop this huge reserve of oil and gas. We remain the only nation in the world that limits access to its own natural resources. Do you think our competitors would let themselves get in this pickle? They must just look at us and laugh.

We should note that one rational voice in all of this came Tuesday from Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA), Chair of the House Resources Committee. Said Pombo, “Time and again, [we] have warned that America would end up at the mercy of OPEC if we didn’t put Americans to work producing more of our own energy. We were right”, he says, “As the price at the pump illustrates, again.”

The solution is right here if we want it. Click here to tell your elected representatives to stop with the speeches and turn on the spigot.