Today, the Senate will vote on a motion to proceed on a bill addressing currency manipulators, targeted mainly at China. Reuters writes about it with the cynical headline “Senators court 2012 voters with China currency,” but yes, I think they’ve calculated that a bill that would save money, create millions of jobs over time, and [...]

Factions on the right have started to mobilize against the China currency bill, which comes up for a Senate vote next week. The Club for Growth has criticized the bill in familiar “trade war” terms. Sherrod Brown’s bill would result in higher costs to American consumers and would be devastating to economic growth. Starting a [...]

Here are a couple of happy Labor Day messages courtesy of McClatchy. First, from the nation’s largest commercial bank, desperately trying to get small enough to fail: As they work to complete the first phase of a major efficiency program, Bank of America Corp. executives are discussing plans that could slash the companywide workforce by [...]

An interesting Week in Review article took a look at what it characterized as a back-door industrial policy emanating from the Obama Administration, particularly in some of the advanced battery factories in and around Michigan. It had the unfortunate title of “Does America Need Manufacturing?”, which is self-evident as long as Americans still desire to [...]

Protesters have been massing in front of the White House for over a week to stop a tar sands pipeline that will apparently go forward. We will soon have a Presidential election between the Administration that is pushing the tar sands pipeline forward, and a Republican challenger who will advocate for increased drilling in the [...]

The markets are sinking once again, with money flying into 10-year Treasuries, dropping the yields to an insanely low 2.07%. The explanations are a little thin. Weekly unemployment claims are up but not sharply. The European situation continues to smolder, but no more than yesterday. It’s probably this report from Morgan Stanley, telling most of [...]

The middling unemployment report should not cause people to neglect the massive sell-off in the stock market yesterday, which was predicated mainly on fears of a global return to no growth or even a double-dip recession. Those possibilities are increasing because of this move to austerity and the problems with containing sovereign debt crises in [...]

The Obama Administration moved forward on a free trade agreement with Panama today, satisfying the final condition put up by Republicans to allow Congressional action on stalled trade agreements with South Korea and Colombia. The White House supplied a fact sheet on the deal. The sticking point with Colombia was the murder of trade unionists [...]

The President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, commissioned at the beginning of the Obama Presidency, will be allowed to expire in February. That means its chairman, former Fed chair Paul Volcker, will cease being an advisor to the President. A new commission on jobs will replace the PERAB, and the White House got their CEO advisor [...]

In his state of American business speech, US Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue asserted that the US economy will grow by 3.2% in 2011, and somewhere around 2.5 million jobs will be created. Wall Street’s dumping of safe US Treasury bonds is seen as another sign that they can grab higher yields through risk-taking, [...]

It’s not clear if Senators Reid and McConnell will allow much in the way of amendments to the tax cut deal, which should get a cloture vote shortly. But Senators are already filing those amendments, and one intriguing bipartisan one comes from Sen. Sherrod Brown’s office. U.S. Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Olympia J. Snowe [...]