| Business News, Financial News, Business Headlines & Analysis - The Washington Post | | The source for business news and analysis. Covering economic policy, business policy, financial news, economic issues, stock market data, local business, technology and more. | |
 | Are we ready for change? Jan 22nd 2013, 23:44 I listen to presidential speeches with an ear to the parts about personal finance. In President Obama's second inaugural address, he made a few interesting points. The first reference came when he said, "For we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it." Read full article >>   | | How will Congress fix the sequester? Nobody knows! Jan 22nd 2013, 21:02 The House GOP's bill would prevent a debt-ceiling stand-off in February. But even if everything goes according to plan, the agreement won't do anything to stop the automatic, across-the-board cuts from taking effect on March 1, which both parties insist they want to avoid. Read full article >>   | | Obama 'will not oppose' House GOP plan to suspend debt limit until May Jan 22nd 2013, 20:58 Forget about raising the federal debt limit. House Republicans are proposing to ignore it altogether — at least until May 18. The House plans to vote Wednesday on a measure that would leave the $16.4 trillion borrowing limit intact but suspend it from the time the bill passes until mid-May. The declaration that the debt ceiling "shall not apply" means that the government could continue borrowing to cover its obligations to creditors until May 18. Read full article >>   | | Study: Job placement programs don't work. Jan 22nd 2013, 20:07 One of the biggest challenges in designing social programs is to make sure you're not just rewarding people for doing what they were already planning to do. When designing, say, a mortgage-interest tax deduction to promote homeownership, you want to encourage people who otherwise would rent to buy, not just give a tax break to people who would buy homes anyway. You also don't want to keep the number of people doing the subsidized activity the same, and just change who is doing it. Economists refer to that phenomenon as "displacement." Read full article >>   | | The GOP's strange debt ceiling bill Jan 22nd 2013, 18:30 On the surface, the proposal seems like a (temporary) capitulation in the debt-ceiling stand-off: House Republicans will vote tomorrow to raise the debt ceiling for three months, on the condition that the Senate passes a budget that will presumably include significant deficit reduction. Read full article >>   | | Life from a penguin's point of view Jan 22nd 2013, 17:59 We all know penguins are awesome animals. But what's it like to actually be a penguin? Intrepid Japanese scientists endeavored to find out by strapping "small accelerometers on the birds' heads and bodies to capture their movement and the moment they strike." The results, via the Guardian: Read full article >>   | | Monday we celebrated our presidential democracy. Juan Linz thinks that's mistaken. Jan 22nd 2013, 16:33 Juan Linz is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Social and Political Science at Yale University, where he holds appointments in the departments of sociology and political science. He is famous for his work comparing styles of authoritarian and totalitarian governance, and, since the Cold War, his argument in pieces like "The Perils of Presidentialism" that presidential democracies are inherently less stable than their parliamentary peers, and particularly prone to devolve into dictatorships. The United States has long been the exception to that pattern, but with a new debt or budget crisis every few months, that could be changing. I spoke to Linz on Friday; a lightly edited transcript follows. Read full article >> | | Barack Obama's post-crisis presidency Jan 22nd 2013, 13:34 It is easy to forget how different a world we inhabited the last time Barack Obama took the oath of office. The unemployment rate was 7.8 percent, the same as it is today—but then, it was rising by half a percentage point each month; now it is gradually drifting downward. The U.S. economy contracted at a 5.3 percent rate that quarter. Now it has been growing around two percent for three straight years. The Dow Jones Industrial average was at 7,949. It has risen 5,647 points since then, or 71 percent. Read full article >>   | |
No comments:
Post a Comment