
Breaking News
7/2/2009 | Economy
U.S. job losses accelerate, jobless rate hits 9.5 percent
Reuters
U.S. employers cut 467,000 jobs in June, far more than expected, while the unemployment rate rose to 9.5 percent, the government said on Thursday in a report that showed a labor market continuing to struggle with a deep recession. The June job losses were more than 100,000 greater than the 363,000 consensus of Wall Street economists polled by Reuters and broke a four-month trend of moderation in job losses.
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7/2/2009 | Healthcare
Emotion, few details, in Obama's health care pitch
Associated Press
The health care changes that Obama called for Wednesday would reshape the nation's medical landscape. He says he wants to cover nearly 50 million uninsured Americans, to persuade doctors to stress quality over quantity of care, to squeeze billions of dollars from spending. But details on exactly how to do those things were generally lacking in his hour-long town hall forum before a friendly, hand-picked audience in a Washington suburb. The lingering questions underscore the tough negotiations awaiting Congress, the administration and dozens of special interest groups in the coming months. Lawmakers will return to debating the issue when they return from a one-week recess on Monday
6/29/2009 | Economy, Governmental Control
Central banks seek rankings for financial products
Reuters
Financial products should be treated like medicines and sold to consumers only when they are certified safe to prevent a repeat of last year's financial meltdown, the world's central bankers said on Monday. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which acts as a forum for central banks, said government efforts to revive the global economy might have only a temporary impact because banks are not being pushed hard enough to fix their underlying problems. Banks' lending and other practices, including the approval of risky mortgages in the United States, led the global economy into the worst recession in decades. Governments have poured trillions of dollars into rescuing the financial system and easing a recession that has cut through company workforces.
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6/26/2009 | Economy, Global Warming
The Cap and Tax Fiction
The Wall Street Journal
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has put cap-and-trade legislation on a forced march through the House, and the bill may get a full vote as early as Friday. It looks as if the Democrats will have to destroy the discipline of economics to get it done. The biggest doozy in the CBO analysis was its extraordinary decision to look only at the day-to-day costs of operating a trading program, rather than the wider consequences energy restriction would have on the economy. The CBO acknowledges this in a footnote: "The resource cost does not indicate the potential decrease in gross domestic product (GDP) that could result from the cap."
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6/26/2009 | Healthcare
President Obama Defends Right to Choose Best Care
ABC News
President Obama struggled to explain today whether his health care reform proposals would force normal Americans to make sacrifices that wealthier, more powerful people -- like the president himself -- wouldn't face. A special edition of "Nightline" from inside the White House.The probing questions came from two skeptical neurologists during ABC News' special on health care reform, "Questions for the President: Prescription for America," anchored from the White House by Diane Sawyer and Charles Gibson.
