Economy

What does this study prove? It proves that President Obama is NOT pushing business away as the Republicans would have you believe. Why would a corporation come back to the United States when a President is so anti business?
The study found that 40 percent of manufacturing firms believe there is an increased movement of “reshoring” – or moving manufacturing plants back to the United States from countries such as China and India. While the results differed by industry, the trend was led by aerospace and defense; industrial parts and equipment; electronics; and medical and surgical supplies.

Todd Akin is out with a fanciful new ad. In it he claims that, "federal stimulus spending 'made McCaskill rich.'" (Not to distract from the main point, but wasn't she rich before the stimulus?) Apropos the ad, Akin asserts:
... Claire McCaskill is on record for going through the stimulus line by line, and stated that the stimulus was solely for creating jobs and stimulating the economy, [...]. Now we know that McCaskill's family business received $1 million of taxpayer money from the stimulus bill that she voted for. I voted against this bill because I did not believe it would help the economy and because pork-barrel spending can neither stimulate the economy nor create jobs.

There is a theory in corporate America that CEOs must be paid top dollar for their skills in order to keep them from constantly shopping their skills to the highest bidder. But a new study by Craig K. Ferrere and Charles M. Elson, director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware, debunks that theory and shows that CEO skills are often non-transferable. Further, the study shows that one of the main factors in determining CEO pay rates, the peer-group benchmark, is woefully ineffective and drives up pay rates for less qualified CEOs.

Mortgage giant Freddie Mac did not keep homeowners trapped in high-interest loans in order to boost profits on billions of dollars’ worth of complex financial bets it had made. That’s the conclusion reached in a report released today by the inspector general that oversees the agency in charge of Freddie Mac.
Last January, ProPublica and NPR reported that Freddie had dramatically expanded its holdings of mortgage-backed securities that would profit if homeowners stayed in their existing high-interest-rate loans. At the same time, the company had taken steps that made it harder for homeowners to refinance at lower interest rates. Our report stated that there was no evidence of a coordinated attempt to bet against homeowners’ ability to refinance. The inspector general’s report concludes that there was none.

The hits keep coming from Mitt Romney. Fresh off stating it is fair for himself to pay less in taxes than the rest of us he had a lot to outdo. But outdo it he did. If you are uninsured just go to the ER.

Food is not the only health issue that the metaphor of a “desert” can be applied to Bronx residents, especially young people, have so much difficulty finding opportunities for sports and recreation in the neighborhoods and their schools that the Borough can be described as an Exercise Desert as well. The following are my criteria for describing a community as an Exercise Desert. I suspect many working class communities around the nation would qualify.

Sunday morning’s papers are replete with details about the sequester—automatic, across-the-board spending cuts to the tune of about $110 billion in 2013—scheduled for next January. They’re the lesser part of the much-lamented fiscal cliff, which also includes the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and a bunch of other cats and dogs. If we go over and stay over, there’s a good chance our already wobbly economy would be whacked back into recession.

David Dayen of Firedoglake joined the show and told us why the gobbling up of foreclosed homes across the United States by hedge funds and investment firms could lead to another housing bubble

Occupy Wall Street, which celebrated its one-year anniversary yesterday, has helped bring economic justice and fair taxation to the forefront of our political debate. But here in the Twin Cities, Occupy has also accomplished another feat. The ragtag group of activists operating under the "Occupy Homes" banner have helped embolden struggling homeowners to fight big banks and lenders and stay in their homes.

Quick, how many billions in the red are taxpayers on the bailout of GM? AIG? Fannie and Freddie? Is it true that the government has reaped a profit from bailing out the banks?
It should be easy to find answers to such questions. But while it's a snap to find rosy administration claims about the bailout, finding hard numbers is much more difficult. That's why, since the bailouts began in 2008, we've maintained a frequently updated site to provide them. Now we've retooled our database to make it even easier to find these sorts of answers.
So you can effortlessly discover that it's $27 billion for GM, $23 billion for AIG, $91 billion for Fannie, $51 billion for Freddie, and yes, the bank investments have so far returned a profit of $19 billion.