The farm belt has been facing one of the severest droughts in its history and recent forecasts conclude that the next 3 months are going to make a bad situation worse. The situation has deteriorated to the point where hundreds of counties are being labeled disaster areas due to drought: The U.S. Agriculture Department cited [...]

I’m not suggesting that convicted con men should perpetually give testimony in Congressional hearings. But on something like the JOBS Act, it wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Because they could tell you in a matter of minutes why you wouldn’t want to relax restrictions on capital formation to this degree. Mark L. Morze knows [...]

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Yves Smith points us to a nice takedown of the woeful JOBS Act, which should get signed into law this week. Chris Hayes had Bill Black and Alexis Goldstein of Occupy the SEC on to talk about it, with Rep. Carolyn Maloney making [...]

The House may not have been able to pass a transportation bill yesterday to enable the smooth functioning of two million construction jobs, but they did find the time to kill a bunch of investor protections and deregulate the securities markets: The House on Tuesday afternoon approved the final, Senate-passed version of the Jumpstart Our [...]

After both houses of Congress passed it, the White House is finally recognizing that the deregulatory bill they proposed and pushed is distasteful to liberals who have actually looked at it for longer than two seconds: White House allies are in an uproar over pro-business legislation embraced by President Obama, exposing a new rift in [...]

I had a little Twitter spat with Zandar today after he responded to a tweet I wrote about the STOCK Act with a rejoinder that I probably thought it was “Obama’s fault.” Zandar has adopted this Sixth Sense, “I see Obama critics, they’re everywhere” mentality of late, extending even to bashing Jon Chait, one of [...]

It’s unusual when the Senate passes one bill in a single day, but today they’ve passed two. And both are an indication of the seriousness of legislating in the modern age. First, we have the JOBS Act, a bill that promises an impossible solution to an unrelated problem, which is a mask for its true [...]

The Senate invoked cloture today on the JOBS Act, the financial deregulation bill that Reid pulled from the floor yesterday after the failure of some amendments that would strengthen the investor protections. The vote was 76-22, with all the no votes coming from Democrats, including (surprisingly) New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, who must be representing the [...]

The Senate plan for the JOBS Act today, a financial deregulation bill that would weaken investor protections with no economic benefit, was for three cloture votes – an amendment to add investor protections to the bill, an amendment to attach a reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank to the bill, and, if those failed, a cloture [...]

Today the Senate will vote on the JOBS Act, part of a deal on judicial confirmations that allows the House-passed bill to come to the floor. The Senate will vote on a substitute amendment that includes a reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank, which could upend the entire bill. And let’s hope so! As Simon Johnson [...]

Overlooked in the mockery of the GOP House taking some innocuous-seeming bills about small business capital formation and wrapping them up into a package to call them the JOBS Act is that the underlying bills themselves are really not good at all. It’s an effort to exempt a bunch of companies from reporting requirements and [...]