Economy

Many experts say slow job recovery is a simple economic reality going back at least 20 years.

There’s a message emerging from Republicans in Congress that says this: rising unemployment numbers are indication that the Democrats’ strategy for economic recovery has been a sheer failure, and they should be removed from office as a result.
What the critics don’t mention is the inconvenient fact that, at least in the last several decades, job [...]

The PBS star attracted crowds to what appeared on the surface as a way to help black borrowers build wealth, but a lawsuit alleges it was actually just the opposite.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) is acting under a legal mandate to investigate the “causes of the collapse of each major financial institution” that failed or received a government bailout in the panicked days of last fall — and the FCIC intends to act quickly, Chairman Phil Angelides said today.
By the end of October, [...]

The 10 members of the panel named by Congress to investigate the causes of last year’s economic implosion appear to be wrestling with their role in this year’s push for financial industry regulatory reform, judging from their statements at today’s first hearing.
Brooksley Born, who fought unsuccessfully to regulate derivatives during her years at the helm [...]

Unemployment jumped to 9.7 percent in August, though the 216,000 jobs shed were fewer than expected, the Labor Department reported this morning.
It should come as no surprise.
Economists, for many months, have warned that employment rates are among the last economic indicators to rebound from a recession, and there’s no reason to think that this time [...]

Jason Pye reports that Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) will schedule an October committee vote on HR 1207, the “audit the Federal Reserve” bill introduced by Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas).
We will subject them to a complete audit. I’ve been working with Ron Paul, who’s the main sponsor of that bill. He agrees we don’t want to [...]

On ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, both Paul Krugman and Robert Reich offered far more pessimistic views of the economy than the rosier outlook put forth by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Friday. Krugman described the economy as languishing in purgatory. Reich explained that the only good news is that the economy is getting [...]

Interesting. A new Rasmussen Reports poll finds that, by a 16-point margin, Americans still blame the recession on former President George W. Bush’s policies instead of President Barack Obama’s policies. That’s unchanged since June, according to Scott Rasmussen.
The partisan gap is noticeable. Eighty-two percent (82%) of Democrats see Obama’s Republican predecessor as the cause of [...]

A new study from the libertarian CATO Institute concludes that legalizing the more than eight million undocumented workers in the United States would have significant economic benefits for the country, while simply enhancing border enforcement and applying restrictive immigration laws would actually hurt the U.S. economically.