By John Solomon
How the government's punishing of the exposure of official wrongdoing can linger for years
The 2014 election battle for control of the Senate will affect just about everything the upper chamber does this year and next, because it could take just a handful of upsets to put the Republicans back in charge.
A private survey shows U.S. companies added just 119,000 jobs in April, the fewest in seven months.
Wall Street on Wednesday celebrated Congress' vote to prevent sharp tax increases from hitting the economy and causing a recession this year, with the Dow Jones industrial average surging by 308 points. But economic gurus warned that the deal falls short of solving the nation's huge debt problems.
Warning that more than 2 million Americans are poised to lose their long-term unemployment insurance, some Democrats are calling on Congress to extend the "economic lifeline" before it expires next month.
Wall Street stock markets and Atlantic City casinos shut down, hundreds of flights were canceled, and numerous companies postponed earnings announcements. The short-term economic impacts of Hurricane Sandy were already evident by Monday evening, but the ultimate bill for the struggling nation's economy could take a while to add up.
President Obama's first four years in office have proven a profitable time for stock pickers on Wall Street and expensive one for everyday commuters, but how the bull market in stocks and the high prices at the pump will balance out at the polls in November is an open question.
The Federal Reserve has given the public increasingly more information about its work and its thinking. More doesn't always mean more revealing.
The federal student loan program seemed like a great idea back in 1965: Borrow to go to college now, pay it back later when you have a job. But many borrowers these days are close to flunking out, tripped up by painful real-life lessons in math and economics.
The federal student-loan program seemed like a great idea back in 1965: borrow to go to college now, pay it back later when you have a job.
In a major shift, the Federal Reserve will start announcing four times a year how long it plans to keep short-term interest rates at current levels, according to minutes from its December policy meeting.
Do increases in government spending increase or decrease the number of jobs? Conventional wisdom is they will increase jobs, and a few left-wing economists, such as Paul Krugman of the New York Times, frequently are trotted out by reckless politicians and some in the news media to argue that we need more government spending in order to create jobs. If this were true, we should be able to see it in the historical evidence, so let's look at the numbers.
The modest uptick in economic growth is a welcome breather in the bleak Obama economy, but it won't reduce unemployment anytime soon.
While Congress and the White House still have more than two weeks to raise the debt ceiling before the Treasury Department's early August deadline, the financial markets are getting jittery, fearing they won't reach a deal in time.
While President Obama and congressional Republican leaders have publicly dug in their heels on critical debt-limit negotiations, Obama's spokesman said Tuesday the president and Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell will continue discussions.
Americans are getting hit on all fronts nowadays. Wages are flat or falling. Income-tax bills are due by April 18. Food prices are rising. And gas prices that are soaring toward $4 a gallon now threaten to reverse the nation's economic-growth rate.
"It probably forestalls any increase in unemployment, but it's certainly not enough to generate any declines in unemployment," Mr. Zandi said.
That led Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, which compiles the job figures, to say the economy appears to be "throttling back" on the jobs front.
