Holy bear market, Batman! Bruce Wayne among super interns credited on White House economic report

It’s super time-consuming being a superhero, what with all the crime fighting and public outreach and all, so it’s just darn impressive that the likes of Peter Parker, Bruce Wayne, and Steve Rogers could find the time to help create the White House’s annual economic report. Yes — they were all credited as student interns who provided “invaluable help” on the project.

Economist Martha Gimbel of Indeed.com, who apparently worked for the Council of Economic Advisers back when interns weren’t quite as super, was one of many experts to notice the practical joke.

To be fair, our super friends received help from a great deal of gifted folks, including Monty Python alum John Cleese, USS Voyager captain Kathryn Janeway, Peter Parker raiser Aunt May, and the King in the North himself, Jon Snow -- who you’d think would have “nothing” to contribute to a modern economic report, considering how much he knows.

Yet somehow, all these fictional folks, along with many presumably real ones, are thanked as interns who have helped out with “research projects, day-to-day operations, and fact-checking” for this year’s report put out by the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. The 705-page report takes darn near all of the year to compile, so perhaps it’s just good business practices to hire the best, brightest, and most powerful to help out with such an endeavor.

The CEA, for its part, is playing up the stunt, while noting that their interns are indeed superheroes.

Hopefully that’s the case — that this is just good old-fashioned economist hijinks, and that this page of the report didn’t just really need a super editor.

Heck, as long as we're hoping, let's cross our fingers that the president's proposed NASA budget is also a prank.

(via NPR)