The Finance Minister for Greece, Yannis Stournaras, claims that the country will be given more time by its international creditors to reach deficit targets, smoothing out the level of austerity required in the near term. But he might want to tell his international creditors about it. Greece had been asking for two more years to [...]

is brief set of calculations from the Wall Street Journal’s Ellen Schultz shows simply how much of a raw deal American workers have been getting from defined-contribution retirement plans. It is impossible for them to generate the rate of return of a defined benefit plan, just completely impossible.

Greg Palast has a new story out about Mitt Romney’s profit from Delphi Automotive, an auto parts subsidiary of GM, during the auto rescue. No bailout of GM—or Chrysler, for that matter—could have been successful without saving Delphi. So, in addition to making massive loans to automakers in 2009, the federal government sent, directly or [...]

As we wait for the outcome of the most high-profile labor dispute currently happening in America, the Chicago Teachers Union strike, I want to call attention to the other big labor action out there. National Football League referees have been locked out of the job since the beginning of the year. Four weeks of preseason [...]

My article about the postal service got an unusually robust amount of play among the blogosphere, so I thought I’d respond to some of the comments. First of all, I think there’s wide agreement on the left that the postal service doesn’t actually have a funding problem at the current time. This recent default stems [...]

It’s the time of the (election) season where Congress does everything it can to delay contentious issues until after November. So it is with two particular measures they’d rather not deal with at this time. Senate-passed bills to cut farm subsidies and food stamps and overhaul the financially teetering Postal Service have been put on [...]

Congress has quickly passed a series of bills, consolidated into one package, that freezes federal student loan interest rates at 3.4% for one year, and extends surface transportation funding for two years. The package also reauthorizes the federal flood insurance program for five years. Congress was clearly eager to get out of town for the [...]

As we await the Supreme Court ruling on health care, two of the other major stories of the week have reached a conclusion. Congress has reached agreement on a compromise package that will avert three separate deadlines and deliver some of the more robust lawmaking of the entire year to date. The first bill averts [...]

House Speaker John Boehner assured reporters today that bipartisan deals are near on two pieces of legislation that must be passed before expiration on Saturday. The two bills, one to prevent the federal student loan interest rate from doubling, and the other to extend surface transportation funding for two years, have been tied up in [...]

Just to set up this week, we’re going to see verdicts in two major Supreme Court cases, on the health care individual mandate and the Arizona immigration law; a contempt vote in the House against Attorney General Eric Holder; and in Congress, we have deadlines on two important pieces of legislation, the transportation funding bill [...]

I’ve been tracking the two deadlines for Congress coming up in just over a week. If no action is taken, new federal student loans will see an interest rate of 6.8%, double the current 3.4%. And there will be no surface transportation bill, meaning that highway projects with federal participation will grind to a halt [...]