Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry would do the most damage to the economy if elected president, voters believe, while Mitt Romney and Herman Cain would do the most to improve the economy, according to a poll released Monday. (more)
Home-improvement stores selling emergency supplies and coffee shops providing a break from the cleanup may benefit from Hurricane Irene, while department stores shut because of flooding likely lost sales. (more)
U.S. stocks surged, breaking a four- week losing streak for the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke indicated the economy isn’t deteriorating enough to warrant any immediate stimulus. Treasuries trimmed gains and the dollar swung to a loss. (more)
Hurricane Irene, forecast to reach New York this weekend, has the potential to shut down the New York Stock Exchange, a company executive said. (more)
NEW YORK (AP) — Financial data and news company Bloomberg LP said Thursday that it will pay $990 million for BNA, a publisher of legal, tax and regulatory information. (more)
Gold plunged $104 in New York, capping the biggest drop since March 2008, on speculation that financial markets may be stabilizing, eroding the appeal of the precious metal as a haven. (more)
As a political matter, the Obama White House has been praised for its handling of the turmoil in Egypt. But on policy, the president has been criticized on both the right and the left, his critics ranging from Charles Krauthammer to Chris Matthews. (more)
1.) Obama’s jobs team gets green-washed — “President Barack Obama will name Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric Co.’s chief executive officer, to head his outside panel of economic advisers, replacing former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker,” reports Bloomberg News. “Immelt has sounded many of the administration’s themes: boosting jobs through U.S. exports, ensuring companies can compete with powers like China and India, and jumpstarting a clean-energy economy. Immelt wrote today that he and Obama ‘are committed’ to making the U.S. ‘the most competitive and innovating economy in the world.’” According to Bloomberg, “Immelt is among a group of executives — Boeing Co. CEO Jim McNerney; Motorola Solutions Inc. CEO Greg Brown, and Honeywell International Inc. Chairman David Cote — who have voiced support for Obama policies. The four serve on several of the president’s outside advisory boards”–and all four have made a killing on green jobs subsidies (more)
1.) White House reporters ask first truly tough questions in two years — Pres. Obama was inaugurated two years ago today, which means it only took the White House Press Corp members one year, 11 months, and 29 days to find their spines. “Could you explain to the American people how the United States could be so allied with a country that is known for treating its people so poorly, using censorship and force to oppress its people?” asked AP reporter Ben Feller. He then turned to China’s Hu Jintao and asked, “How do you justify China’s record and do you think that’s any of the business of the American people?” When a mixup with the translator prevented Hu from hearing Feller’s question, Bloomberg’s Hans Nichols used his turn to ask Feller’s question again. But no amount of tough questioning could force either Obama or Hu to answer honestly. And in front of God and everyone, the 2009 Nobel Prize winner claimed that the country which is keeping the 2010 Nobel Prize winner under house arrest has made “enormous progress” on human rights which has been “widely recognized in the world.” The ensuing cognitive dissonance threw the Washington Post for a spin. Both headlines appeared in this morning’s paper: “President Obama makes Hu Jintao look good on rights”; “Obama presses Chinese leader on rights.” (more)
There was much speculation coming into Chinese President Hu Jintao’s appearance at the White House on Wednesday about how he would handle the inevitable questions about human rights in China during a rare appearance in front of U.S. reporters. (more)
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has joined House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and President Obama in contributing to the “It Gets Better” campaign. Sex columnist Dan Savage launched the campaign four months ago to “provide hope for lesbian, gay, bi, trans and other bullied teens by letting them know that ‘It Gets Better.’” (more)
A woman with stroke symptoms in Midwood, Brooklyn, waited for an ambulance for six hours, finally arriving at the hospital with telltale signs of advanced brain damage. In Forest Hills, Queens, bystanders waited for three hours next to a man lying unconscious in the snow before they were able to flag down help. And in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a mother in labor who started calling 911 at 8:30 a.m. on Monday did not get an ambulance until 6 p.m., too late to save the baby. (more)
A chastened mayor Bloomberg is scrambling to save his reputation as a top-flight manager after a string of snow-removal snafus left New Yorkers fuming. (more)
1.) Incoming congress knows that water wears down the rock not by force, but with constant falling — “To prevent deficit reduction from being used as an excuse for tax hikes, Republicans are getting rid of the ‘Pay-As-You-Go’ rule and replacing it with a ‘Cut-As-You-Go’ rule,” reports The Daily Caller’s Jon Ward. “The rule will require that any legislation that seeks to increase mandatory spending (which is spending that once added to the federal budget recurs year after year and is thus permanent) cuts spending by a similar amount.” If successful, this would change the entire economy of the House. “As [Blunt] put it, ‘Let’s turn the activists for big government on each other, instead of letting them gang up on the taxpayer,’” said Majority Leader John Boehner. “Through this public discussion, we might end up finding out that neither program has a whole lot of merit in the first place.” Instead of trading horses, people will start shooting them. This means fewer horses to feed. (more)
1.) How the left astroturfed net neutrality into existence — Despite what you may have heard, yesterday’s net neutrality vote at the FCC wasn’t the result of millions of Americans or even tens of thousands of Americans waking up and saying, “I think I am going to suddenly care about this!” No, like most Washington success stories, yesterday’s enslavement of the Internet was made possible by a small group of people with a lot of money. “After McCain-Feingold passed, several of the foundations involved in the effort began shifting their attention to “media reform”—a movement to impose government controls on Internet companies somewhat related to the long-defunct “Fairness Doctrine” that used to regulate TV and radio companies,” writes the WSJ’s John Fund. Those outfits are Pew Charitable Trusts, Bill Moyers’s Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, the Joyce Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, all of which have given money to left-wing froth factory Free Press. As a result of Free Press’s close ties to staffers for FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, net neutrality crusaders gamed the debate from the beginning: “Some of the same foundations that have spent years funding net neutrality advocacy research ended up funding the FCC-commissioned study that evaluated net neutrality research.” (more)
1.) Romney joins growing chorus of anti-something-something conservatives — The number of conservatives who are opposed to the tax cut deal is growing. On Monday, Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney joined radio host Hugh Hewitt, the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer, and Senators Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint in opposing the bill on the grounds that “the temporary nature of the taxrate extension would limit the positive economic impact and correspondingly make the deficit worse,” writes The Daily Caller’s Jon Ward. Romney, like the others mentioned above, has also raised red flags about unfunded spending contained in the bill. Coincidentally, you could say the same thing about Romneycare. (more)
A majority of Americans feel that America has is “on the wrong track,” and that they are worse off than they were in 2008. (more)
U.S. home values are poised to drop by more than $1.7 trillion this year amid rising foreclosures and the expiration of homebuyer tax credits, said Zillow Inc., a closely held provider of home price data. (more)
Despite a concerted effort to portray himself as an unashamed centrist, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg faces drastically low approval ratings from Republicans, Democrats and independents alike, a new poll suggests. (more)
Starbucks Corp., the world’s biggest coffee chain, plans to more than double the rate at which it opens stores to an average of more than one a day as the global economy recovers. (more)
