Daily Policy Digest
Economic Issues
| Foreign Industrial Investment Is Reshaping America Since 2008, foreign direct investment to Germany, France, Japan and South Korea has stagnated; in contrast, in 2010 foreign investment in the United States rose 49 percent... |
| What Made the Financial Crisis Systemic? Markets can become unbalanced, but they generally correct themselves before crises become systemic... |
| What's the Truth about the Unemployment Numbers? While 1.66 million net jobs have been added during the Obama "recovery," over that same time the number of working age Americans not in the labor force rose by 7.14 million... |
| The High Cost of the Fed's Cheap Money During the past three years, the Federal Reserve has tripled the size of its balance sheet -- in effect printing $2 trillion -- something it had never done in its nearly 100-year history... |
| Are We Looking at the Wrong Depression? Policymakers should draw comparisons from the Long Depression instead of the Great Depression and recognize the current crisis for what it is: a gradual realignment of labor in response to technological innovations... |
| U.S. Pushes Target for Hiring the Disabled A new initiative by the Obama administration would set a minimum 7 percent disabled workforce for businesses that have contracts with the federal government... |
| GM's Profits Don't Mean Taxpayers Will Be Off the Hook Despite General Motors' ambitious profit targets for 2012, taxpayers are still facing somewhere from $20 billion to $30 billion in losses... |
| Labor's Under-the-Radar Power Grab Project Labor Agreements typically increase the price tag of a given project by 13 to 15 percent... |
| Improving Labor Market Calls for Reducing Unemployment Insurance Duration Unemployment insurance benefits lasting 99 weeks have increased the unemployment rate by approximately 0.5 percent... |
| The Pain of Zero Interest Rates The low returns offered by secure assets such as the Treasury and insured deposits is damaging to households that had planned for greater income from maturing nest eggs... |
