The UK’s ruinous experiment with austerity only highlights how good the US economic news is for Obama’s re-election chances There were two major pieces of good news Friday on the US economy. First, there was better-than-expected news from the non-manufacturing survey from the ISM , which added to a very positive sister survey of manufacturing earlier in the week. The combined message that can be drawn from the two surveys is that the US economy grew at the fastest rate for ten months in January.