While Washington wrestles with the nation's burgeoning budget deficits, some good news has emerged on the other deficit front: The nation's bloated trade deficit appears to be turning the corner, with at least one prominent economist predicting it will disappear altogether within a decade.
The U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 3.1 percent over the summer as consumers spent more and state and local governments added to growth for the first time in three years — but the economy is likely slowing in the current quarter.
A former managing director of PPG Paints Trading Co. in Shanghai, a wholly-owned Chinese subsidiary of U.S.-based PPG Industries was sentenced Thursday to a year in prison for conspiring to illegally export high-performance epoxy coatings to nuclear reactors in Pakistan.
The U.S. Department of Commerce, according to its mission statement, is responsible for "job creation, economic growth, and improved standards of living for all Americans."
The federal government has cleared VeriSign Inc. to manage the databases that house ".com" domain names for another six years, but the company won't be allowed to raise prices without approval.
The federal government has cleared VeriSign Inc. to manage the databases that house ".com" domain names for another six years, but the company won't be allowed to raise prices without approval.
Over the last decade, the government has awarded nearly a third of its advertising, marketing and public relations business without full and open competition designed to ensure taxpayers get the best price.
The U.S. economy grew at a faster 2.7 percent annual rate from July through September, although the strength may fade in the final months of the year.
Even with ho-hum growth, the U.S. is starting to look like an outperformer in a world where Britain and the rest of Europe are in a double-dip recession, Japan is falling into what may be a triple-dip downturn, and some formerly robust emerging markets recently have slowed to a near-standstill.
