Yet Mr. Christie has been adamant that New Jersey is on the way back, and that this makes room for, you guessed it, tax cuts that would disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

Last week reality hit: David Rosen, the state’s independent, nonpartisan budget analyst, told legislators that the state faces a $1.3 billion shortfall. How did the governor respond?

First, by attacking the messenger. According to Mr. Christie, Mr. Rosen — a veteran public servant whose office usually makes more accurate budget forecasts than the state’s governor — is “the Dr. Kevorkian of the numbers.” Civility! By the way, even Mr. Christie’s own officials are predicting a major budget shortfall, just not quite as big. And the two big credit-rating agencies, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, have recently issued warnings about New Jersey’s budget situation, which S.& P. called “structurally unbalanced” because of the governor’s optimistic revenue assumptions.

New Jersey, then, is still in dire fiscal shape. So is our tough-talking governor willing to reconsider his pet tax cut? Fuhgeddaboudit. Instead, he wants to fill the hole with one-shot budget gimmicks, including reneging on a promise to reduce borrowing for transportation investment and diverting funds from clean-energy programs. So much for fiscal responsibility.

Will Mr. Christie’s budget temper tantrum end speculation that he might become Mr. Romney’s running mate? I have no idea. But it really doesn’t matter: whoever Mr. Romney picks, he or she will cheerfully go along with the budget-busting, reverse Robin Hood policies that you know are coming if the former governor wins.

For the modern American right doesn’t care about deficits, and never did. All that talk about debt was just an excuse for attacking Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and food stamps. And as for Mr. Christie, well, he’s just another fiscal phony, distinguished only by his fondness for invective.

Actually, before I get to that, let me take a moment to debunk a fairy tale that we’ve been hearing a lot from Wall Street and its reliable defenders — a tale in which the incredible damage runaway finance inflicted on the U.S. economy gets flushed down the memory hole, and financiers instead become the heroes who saved America.

Once upon a time, this fairy tale tells us, America was a land of lazy managers and slacker workers. Productivity languished, and American industry was fading away in the face of foreign competition.

Then square-jawed, tough-minded buyout kings like Mitt Romney and the fictional Gordon Gekko came to the rescue, imposing financial and work discipline. Sure, some people didn’t like it, and, sure, they made a lot of money for themselves along the way. But the result was a great economic revival, whose benefits trickled down to everyone.

You can see why Wall Street likes this story. But none of it — except the bit about the Gekkos and the Romneys making lots of money — is true.

For the alleged productivity surge never actually happened. In fact, overall business productivity in America grew faster in the postwar generation, an era in which banks were tightly regulated and private equity barely existed, than it has since our political system decided that greed was good.

What about international competition? We now think of America as a nation doomed to perpetual trade deficits, but it was not always thus. From the 1950s through the 1970s, we generally had more or less balanced trade, exporting about as much as we imported. The big trade deficits only started in the Reagan years, that is, during the era of runaway finance.

And what about that trickle-down? It never took place. There have been significant productivity gains these past three decades, although not on the scale that Wall Street’s self-serving legend would have you believe. However, only a small part of those gains got passed on to American workers.

So, no, financial wheeling and dealing did not do wonders for the American economy, and there are real questions about why, exactly, the wheeler-dealers have made so much money while generating such dubious results.

Most states are still more than two years away from returning to prerecession employment levels, according to a new analysis.

Only four states — Alaska, North Dakota, Texas, and Louisiana — have created enough jobs since the recovery to get back to where they were prior to the recession, according to economist Steven Frable of IHS Global Insight . All four of those states have benefited from an energy boom, and Louisiana was starting at a low level of employment after taking a major hit from Hurricane Katrina.

Two more states, New York and West Virginia, are expected to return to their prerecession peak later this year, and 10 more should reach the mark next year. But the majority of states still won’t get there until after 2014. Meanwhile, returning to peak employment levels doesn’t necessarily mean jobs markets are healed. In fact, getting back to where a state started doesn’t account for the jobs needed by new entrants to the labor force over the past four years.

Eighteen states still are more than 5% below their 2007 employment levels, and the two worst-hit states — Nevada and Michigan — are still more than 10% off their peaks. Frable estimates those two states, as well as Rhode Island which has seen sluggish job growth, won’t return to prerecession peaks until sometime after 2017.

China can bypass Wall Street when buying United States government debt in what is the Treasury’s first direct relationship with a foreign government, according to documents viewed by Reuters.

The relationship means the People’s Bank of China can buy United States debt using a different method from any other central bank.

Other central banks, including the Bank of Japan, which has a large appetite for Treasuries, place orders with Wall Street banks designated by the government as primary dealers. Those dealers then bid on their behalf at Treasury auctions.

China, which holds $1.17 trillion in Treasuries, still buys some through primary dealers, but since June 2011 it has been able to bypass them.

The documents viewed by Reuters show that the Treasury Department has given the People’s Bank of China a direct computer link to its auction system, which means that it can participate without placing bids through primary dealers. The Chinese first used the access in late June 2011 to buy two-year notes. China still has to go through the market if it wants to sell.

The change was not announced publicly or in any message to primary dealers.

“Direct bidding is open to a wide range of investors, but as a matter of general policy we do not comment on individual bidders,” said Matt Anderson, a Treasury Department spokesman.

While there is no prohibition on direct bidding by foreign government entities, the Treasury’s accommodation of China is unusual.

The Treasury’s sales of debt to China have become part of a politically charged public debate about China’s role as both the largest exporter to the United States and the country’s largest creditor.

The privilege may help China obtain United States debt for a better price by limiting Wall Street’s knowledge of its orders.

Primary dealers are not allowed to charge customers money to bid on their behalf at Treasury auctions, so China is not saving money by cutting out commission fees. Instead, China is protecting information about its bidding habits.

The United States on Thursday announced the imposition of antidumping tariffs of more than 31 percent on solar panels from China.

The move by the Commerce Department is certain to infuriate Chinese officials already upset after recent bilateral frictions over China’s human rights policies and its increasingly confrontational approach toward American allies like the Philippines and Japan.

The antidumping decision is among the biggest in American history, covering one of the largest and fastest-growing categories of imports from China, the world’s largest exporter.

The department said the United States bought $3.1 billion worth of Chinese solar cells last year, giving China more than half the American market for the devices.

Many solar panel installers in the United States have opposed tariffs on Chinese panels, contending that inexpensive imports have helped spur many homeowners and businesses to put solar panels on their rooftops. The new tariffs are likely to mean a substantial increase in the price of solar panels here.

Chinese officials have been indignant at American criticism of their solar power industry, pointing out that the United States has urged China for years to embrace renewable energy as a way to reduce air pollution, combat climate change and limit the need for oil imports from politically volatile countries in the Mideast.

Government support for solar energy is an important feature of China’s current Five-Year Plan, which runs through 2015, although Premier Wen Jiabao publicly cautioned in March that he was becoming concerned about overcapacity in the sector.

The leaders of the G8 group of the world’s most powerful economies say they want debt-stricken Greece to remain in the eurozone.

In their summit communique, G8 leaders also committed themselves to promoting growth alongside fiscal responsibility.

However, the leaders acknowledged “the right measures are not the same for each of us”.

Greece’s possible exit from the eurozone was high on the agenda, following inconclusive elections there.

The leaders of France, Germany, the US, the UK, Italy, Japan, Canada and Russia have been meeting at Camp David in the US state of Maryland.

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Thursday confirmed two nominees chosen by President Obama for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, overcoming Republican objections and bringing the seven-member board to full strength for the first time since 2006, before the economic crisis.

Former President George W. Bush jumped back into presidential politics this week, endorsing presumptive 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney. He also, according to the New York Times, plans to release a book in two months that will lay out his advice on boosting economic growth:

Gingerly, the 43rd president is beginning to add his voice back into the national dialogue. A month ago, he spoke publicly in favor of one of his defining domestic legacies, the tax cuts that still divide the country. Two months from now, he plans to publish a book outlining strategies for economic growth. And on Tuesday, he made a rare return to Washington to promote freedom overseas.

That Bush believes the country needs his thoughts on how to create economic growth is laughable. After all, under his watch, “growth in investment, GDP, and employment all posted their worst performance of any post-war expansion,” while “overall monthly job growth was the worst of any cycle since at least February 1945, and household income growth was negative for the first cycle since tracking began in 1967.” As the Economic Policy Institute found, “between the end of the 2001 recession (2001Q4) and the peak of that expansion (2007Q4), the U.S. economy experienced the worst economic expansion of the post-war era.”

As this chart shows, the only economic indicator on which Bush exceeded the average is corporate profits:

Federal spending is lower now than it was when President Obama took office. I’ll pause to let you absorb the news.

In January 2009, before President Obama had even taken the oath of office, annual spending was set to total 24.9 percent of gross domestic product. Total spending this year, fiscal year 2012, is expected to top out at 23.4 percent of GDP.

Here’s another interesting fact. Taxes today are lower than they were on inauguration day 2009. Back in January 2009, the CBO projected that total federal tax revenue that year would amount to 16.5 percent of GDP. This year? 15.8 percent.

One last nugget. The deficit this year is going to be lower than what it was on the day President Obama took office. Back then, the CBO said the 2009 deficit would be 8.3 percent of GDP. This year’s deficit is expected to come in at 7.6 percent.

The Federal Reserve is worried about the impact on the US economy if government spending is cut sharply.

“The possibility of a sharp fiscal tightening in the United States was also considered a sizable risk,” the US central bank said in the minutes of its April meeting.

Automatic budget cuts that will slash $1.2bn (£754m) will happen at the end of this year if a budget deal is not reached.

The Fed held rates at a record low.

“If agreement is not reached on a plan for the federal budget, a sharp fiscal tightening could occur at the start of 2013,” the minutes said.

“Uncertainty about the trajectory of future fiscal policy could lead businesses to defer hiring and investment.”

After a fierce political debate that saw budget talks go to the wire, Republican and Democratic leaders reached an agreement in August 2011 on raising the US debt limit and avoiding a first default.

Under the the agreement, the US deficit will be reduced by at least $2.1tn over 10 years.

The House of Representatives Republican leader, John Boehner, has indicated he is again prepared to battle President Barack Obama over the budget.

The Fed has vowed to keep rates at “exceptionally low levels” all the way to late 2014.

“Several members” of the Fed also said, the minutes showed, that additional support could be needed if the economic recovery lost momentum.

I’ve noticed that a few of my conservative Facebook friends have linked to the recent debate between Paul Krugman and Ron Paul on Bloomberg. Some of them are embarrassed to find that Krugman was the more convincing participant.

I have a theory as to why. In that short interview Ron Paul revealed that his school of Austrian economics is more about assertions and ideology then it is about empirical data.

I’ll give one example that stuck out to me. In Part 1 of the Mediaite video (at 6:00) Ron Paul argues that there was a lot of economic growth after World War Two because:

After World War Two a lot of the debt was liquidated, but guess what else we did. The troops were coming home…big government liberals wanted to have job problems, they weren’t put into place. we cut spending by some 60%, we slashed taxes, finally the depression ended.

Ron Paul’s gloss over history has a grain of truth and a giant problem. The truth is that America did take a step down from having a war-time command economy. The problem is that Ron Paul makes it sound as if government then immediately shrunk. He even says taxes were “slashed”.

Here is a chart from the Tax Policy Center showing what the historical highest marginal tax rates were.

During World War Two, the rate is between 81% and 94%. After World War Two, it is cut down to a low of 82% before being raised back to 91%, which is where it stays till the Kennedy years, during which it drops to a slightly lower 70%.

If this is what Ron Paul thinks it looks like when American liberals lose what does it look like when they win?

There are many more examples that have been cited by other writers about how government remained large long after World War Two. Airlines were heavily regulated, the interest on checking accounts was regulated, even the beer industry wasn’t deregulated until 1979, and yes, that was by Jimmy Carter.

After World War Two government was bigger than Ron Paul admits. Krugman was making the point that during the era when taxes on America’s richest were highest and the country was most regulated, the country as a whole was better off. That is a very important question to be able to answer, and it is not clear that Paul has even grappled with the implications of that data at all.

There’s such a blizzard of misinformation out there that it’s hard to pick any one thing to single out, but David Frum picks up on one bit from the Paul/Paul show : the remarkable way many on the right now portray the postwar years of prosperity as a triumph of libertarian principles.

Yeah, it was a libertarian paradise all right — with a top marginal tax rate of 91 percent, a third of the work force in unions, and a minimum wage much higher relative to the average wage than it is today.

Propose a return to those conditions now, and everyone on the right would predict utter disaster. What we actually had was unprecedented prosperity.

The Obama administration is expected to announce a broad plan on Thursday to foster development of the nation’s “bioeconomy,” including the use of renewable resources and biological manufacturing methods.

The National Bioeconomy Blueprint, as the plan is called, discusses a variety of measures and strategies to spur research and development of medical treatments, crops, biofuels and biological manufacturing processes that would replace harsher industrial methods.

Use of biology “can allow Americans to live longer, healthier lives, reduce our dependence on oil, address key environmental challenges, transform manufacturing processes, and increase the productivity and scope of the agricultural sector while growing new jobs and industries,” the report says.

Much of what is in the 43-page-report, which the administration released before its planned announcement on Thursday, is a list of government programs that are already under way. So it is not clear what concrete changes, if any, will result.

Still, some biotechnology industry executives and scientists welcomed the plan as a sign of the government’s commitment, saying it would now be easier to push for specific new programs to foster biotechnology development.

“This may be the first time the country has recognized the total impact that biological sciences has for the current and future economy,” Dr. Phillip A. Sharp, a Nobel laureate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the project, said in an e-mail.

The government is expected to announce some fairly new efforts on Thursday that fit with the blueprint. One would strengthen a program that encourages federal agencies to procure bio-based products, like lubricants made from soybeans. Another would allow a repository of clinical trial data at the Food and Drug Administration to be used for disease research.

President Obama is under pressure to create jobs and has long supported innovation as a key to the future of the American economy. But some people in the biotechnology industry have grumbled that the White House’s idea of innovation focused on electronic devices, social media and solar energy.

Basically, what we’re seeing is the contrast between the forced-austerity periphery and the core. Notice, also, that tales of German austerity are greatly exaggerated; the Germans haven’t actually done much real austerity, just as we here haven’t done much real stimulus.

You can try to make excuses here, but imagine what the austerians would be saying if the correlation went the other way.

US taxpayers are unlikely to get all their money back from a $700bn (£432bn) bailout of the country’s stricken banking and automotive sectors, according to a report.

The Troubled Asset Relief Program calmed markets and underpinned the US economy during the financial crisis.

But despite the US Treasury saying last week that Tarp would make a profit, the latest report suggests otherwise.

The report said it was a “misconception that Tarp will make a profit”.

The Office of the Special Inspector General for Tarp has published its latest report to Congress.

It said: “After three-and-a-half years, the Tarp continues to be an active and significant part of the Government’s response to the financial crisis.

“It is a widely held misconception that Tarp will make a profit. The most recent cost estimate for Tarp is a loss of $60bn. Taxpayers are still owed $118.5bn.”

The Federal Reserve’s interest rate setters have raised their forecasts for US economic growth in 2012.

They are predicting growth of between 2.4% and 2.9%, up from their 2.2% to 2.7% projection in January.

They have also lowered their forecast for the unemployment rate to between 7.8% and 8.0% from a range of 8.2% to 8.5% in January.

But they left interest rates unchanged and said they do not expect a rate rise until late 2014.

Seven of the committee members expect to raise rates in 2014 - up from five in January - while none of them expects the first increase to be any later than 2015.

At a news conference, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke said: “Most committee participants expect economic growth to remain moderate over the coming quarters and then to pick up gradually.

“Among other factors, and notwithstanding some signs of improvement, the ongoing weakness of the housing sector still represents a headwind for recovery.

“Strains in global financial markets, though less pronounced generally than last fall, continue to pose significant risks to outlook.”

When David Cameron became PM, and announced his austerity plans — buying completely into both the confidence fairy and the invisible bond vigilantes — many were the hosannas, from both sides of the Atlantic. Pundits here urged Obama to “do a Cameron”; Cameron and Osborne were the toast of Very Serious People everywhere.

Now Britain is officially in double-dip recession, and has achieved the remarkable feat of doing worse this time around than it did in the 1930s.

Britain is also unique in having chosen the Big Wrong freely, facing neither pressure from bond markets nor conditions imposed by Berlin and Frankfurt.

Now, the defense I hear from Cameron apologists is that the austerity mostly hasn’t even hit yet. But that’s really not much of a defense. Remember, the austerity was supposed to work by inspiring confidence; where’s the confidence? Basically, the expansionary aspect should already have kicked in; it’s all contraction from here.

Needless to say, Cameron and Osborne insist that they will not change course, which means that Britain will continue on a death spiral of self-defeating austerity.

Mexican immigration to the United States, the largest wave of migrants from a single country in the nation’s history, has stopped increasing after four decades of surging growth and may be declining, according to a report released Monday by the Pew Hispanic Center .

In what the report called a “notable reversal of the historic pattern,” the number of Mexicans leaving rose sharply in the five years after 2005, while the new flow of migrants coming from Mexico into the United States fell steeply, Pew demographers found.

For the first time in at least two decades, the population of illegal immigrants from Mexico living in this country significantly decreased, according to the report. In 2011, about 6.1 million Mexicans were living here illegally, down from a peak of nearly 7 million in 2007, it said.

“We really haven’t seen anything like this in the last 30 or 40 years,” said Jeffrey Passel, the senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center and a co-writer of the report with D’Vera Cohn and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera. The center, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington that does not advocate policy positions, has provided some of the most reliable estimates for the elusive numbers of Mexican immigrants.

Over all, the report said, about 58 percent of an estimated 11.2 million illegal immigrants in the United States are from Mexico.

The report provides material for all sides in the fierce debate over immigration policy. A major episode in that debate will take place on Wednesday when the Supreme Court hears arguments over a law passed by Arizona in 2010 to expand the powers of the local and state police to conduct immigration enforcement.

Arizona officials say that tough local enforcement measures like SB 1070, the statute they passed, are the most effective way to curb illegal immigration because they pressure migrants who lack legal status to return home. Immigrant advocates say those measures serve to separate families and drive illegal immigrants into the shadows, and they point to prolonged high unemployment in this country as the primary reason for reduced immigration.

Mr. Passel said the data does not allow Pew demographers to say which factor was most important in reducing the population of illegal immigrants. The report cited a mix, including high unemployment in the United States, particularly in the construction industry; heightened border enforcement and increased deportations by the American authorities; and a long-term decline in birth rates in Mexico.

The migration from Mexico that began after 1970 brought, by far, the largest numbers of immigrants from one country in American history, the report said, with about 30 percent of 39.6 million immigrants today having been born in Mexico. The 12 million Mexican-born people who live in the United States — about one in every 10 Mexicans in the world — comprise more than all the immigrants in any other country, the Pew report said.

During an interview last week on The Fernando Espuelas Show, Alexandra Franceschi, Specialty Media Press Secretary of the Republican National Committee, said that the Republican party’s economic platform in 2012 is going to be the same as it was during the Bush years, “just updated”:
ESPUELAS: What do you mean by economic security? Regardless of who the ultimate nominee is, what’s the general idea that the RNC, or the Republican party in general, has in terms of this message?

FRANCESCHI: Well, it’s a message of being able to attain the American dream. It’s less government spending, which a Tarrance Group poll, came out last week actually, shows that the majority of Hispanics believe that less government spending is the way out of this deficit crisis. It’s lowering taxes so small businesses can grow and they can employ more people, because we understand that the private sector is the engine of the economy. It’s not the government. […]

ESPUELAS: Now, how different is that concept from what were the policies of the Bush administration? And the reason I ask that is because there’s some analysis now that is being published talking about the Bush years being the slowest period of job creation since those statistics were created. Is this a different program or is this that program just updated?

FRANCESCHI: I think it’s that program, just updated.

Listen here:

As a result of the Bush economic platform, “growth in investment, GDP, and employment all posted their worst performance of any post-war expansion,” while “overall monthly job growth was the worst of any cycle since at least February 1945, and household income growth was negative for the first cycle since tracking began in 1967.” Meanwhile, the deficit and debt exploded. It would have to be quite the update for the GOP to make anything better happen this time around.

President Obama took office in the first quarter of 2009, when median household income was $54,797.63. As of the last quarter of 2011, median household income was $52,377.21.

This was the interval Mr. Zandi suggested using to check Mr. Romney’s statement, and it shows an income drop of $2,420.42. That’s not $3,000, of course, but it’s still pretty bad.

One could also reasonably argue that it might be more appropriate to use the quarter before Mr. Obama took office as the baseline, rather than the quarter in which he was sworn in. In the fourth quarter of 2008, median household income was about $55,380.17.

Starting from that quarter gives us a decline of $3,002.96, almost exactly the number Mr. Romney cited.

Some important caveats: As I (and others) have said before, presidents probably get much too much credit when the economy is doing well and much too much blame when the economy is doing poorly.

Mr. Obama in particular inherited an economy that was really just starting the death spiral set off by the financial crisis, as you can see in the chart above. And as Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have shown, economies struck by major financial crises generally take 10 years to fully recover.

We’re currently in Year 5 after the crisis first hit. Since median household income hit bottom in the first quarter of 2010, it has risen about $769.36, not nearly enough to cover the ground lost on the way down.

On track? For national bankruptcy, yes. But for recovery, absolutely not. Juncker’s quote betrays a fundamental misreading of what is making markets anxious. He thinks markets shouldn’t worry because Spain is going to follow through on its budget cuts. But markets are worried that Spain is going to follow through on its budget cuts. Austerity would almost certainly shrink the economy and make the country’s unconscionable unemployment even worse.
If you’re persuaded by my opening analogy, you can see why lenders are so concerned about growth. It’s why they don’t actually like austerity. But just today, the Bundesbank — Germany’s national central bank, and the real power behind the ECB — came out and told countries not to worry about growth. Telling a country in a debt crisis like Spain not to worry about growth is like telling man in debt to not worry about finding a job. The most polite way to characterize this advice is “delusional.”
To crib from Keynes, Europe’s policymakers have blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the workings of which they do not understand. They’re not evil. But they’re almost certainly wrong. Rather than consider the possibility that the economy might work differently than they think, they have settled on a simple message: The beatings will continue. Unfortunately, morale will continue to not improve. Eventually, you have to think leaders in Europe’s beat-up countries will begin to wonder if life might be better outside the euro zone. Hopefully, the ECB will come to its senses first.

Even as the nation rebounds from the recession, its lingering effects are reflected in the adversities facing families. Nearly two-thirds of people are concerned about paying for their housing, the poll found, and one in five people with mortgages say they are underwater. Four in 10 parents say they have had to alter expectations for the type of college they can afford to send their children. More than one-third of respondents said high gas prices had created serious financial hardships.

The general election match between Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney is opening with evidence that economic conditions are providing ammunition for both candidates. For Mr. Obama, there is a gradually growing perception that the general outlook is turning brighter, and for Mr. Romney, there are those individuals who are still not feeling substantial improvement in their own lives.

The poll found that the two men are locked in a tight race, with each gathering 46 percent of the support. Nearly an equal number of voters say they are as confident in Mr. Romney’s ability to make the right decisions on the economy and to be commander-in-chief as express confidence in Mr. Obama.

China has increased its holding of US debt for the second month in a row as its foreign exchange reserves continue to rise.

Beijing bought $12.7bn (£8bn) of US Treasuries to increase its holding to $1178.9bn in February, latest data by the US Treasury department showed.

China’s foreign exchange reserves, the largest in the world, rose 3.9% in the first quarter from a year earlier.

China is the largest foreign buyer of US government debt.

“There are not many avenues, other than government bonds, where one can invest billions of dollars every day,” Charles Chaw of China Consulting told the BBC.

But the whole-hearted support of evangelicals, who accounted for nearly one-fourth of all ballots cast in recent presidential elections, will not come without conditions, some leaders warned. During the bitterly fought Republican primary campaign, many conservatives questioned the depth of Mr. Romney’s opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage and government spending. They say that to win the presidency, Mr. Romney may need a fired-up base to produce a large evangelical turnout in swing states like Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia.

If Mr. Romney is to generate more excitement and sacrifice from Christian conservatives, he must “demonstrate a genuine and solid commitment to the core values issues,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian advocacy group. Mr. Perkins said Mr. Santorum had vaulted into conservative favor because “he passionately articulated the connection between America’s financial greatness and its moral and cultural wholeness” and recognized that “the economy and the family are indivisible.”

“Intensity is going to be a big problem for Mitt Romney,” Mr. Perkins said in an interview, comparing an obligatory vote for Mr. Romney, to avoid the alternative of Mr. Obama, to “eating your vegetables.”

Mr. Romney, a range of evangelical leaders said, must not waver in his support for conservative principles if he hopes to tap the energies of Christian conservatives in the general campaign.

The US will make a profit from bailing out the nation’s banks and carmakers at the height of the financial crisis, the Treasury Department has said.

The bank bailouts may result in a return of $2bn (£1.3bn), the Treasury said in its latest projections for the government’s response to the crisis.

And the recovering auto industry has added 230,000 jobs as a result.

The recession was the worst since the Great Depression and $19.2tn of wealth was wiped out, it said.

“Although the economy is getting stronger, we have a long way to go to fully repair the damage the crisis has left behind,” the Treasury said.

“We are still living with the broader economic cost of the crisis, which can be seen in high unemployment.”

The vast majority of the projected returns - more than $179bn - come from the Federal Reserve’s huge investments and loans to banks.

The Fed and the Treasury together invested $182bn just to save insurance giant AIG.

US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has said the US economy is yet to fully recover from the impact of the global financial crisis.

Mr Bernanke said that more regulatory action was needed to ensure the stability of the financial markets.

However, he warned that as these procedures were put in place new risks might emerge.

Mr Bernanke’s comments come amid calls for a tighter control of the sector to avoid a repeat of the financial crisis.

“Even as we make progress on known vulnerabilities, we must be mindful that our financial system is constantly evolving and that unanticipated risks will develop over time,” Mr Bernanke said.

What the graph shows clearly, and the numbers back up, is that men took a bigger hit than women, and the decline in jobs for men began much earlier. The downturn in male employment began in May 2007 — a full seven months before the official start (in December 2007) of what became the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. Female employment continued to rise for 10 months after the downturn in male employment, and it peaked in March 2008.

By the time Obama took office in January 2009, both male and female employment were in a steep decline that continued for over a year. Male employment hit bottom in February 2010, and female employment continued to slump for another seven months, bottoming out in September 2010. And as the chart clearly shows, the job recovery for women not only started later, the rate of recovery has been slower.

Why is that? “If you look back to the start of the recession, many of the industries (construction and manufacturing) that were very hard hit initially were male-dominated,” said Margot Dorfman, CEO of the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce, in an interview with FactCheck.org.

It wasn’t until later that jobs like retail and government jobs, particularly teaching jobs, began to take a hit, affecting women more, Dorfman said. Those jobs have been slower to recover.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor under George W. Bush, says Romney’s statistic isn’t properly focused. She notes that the unemployment rate for women has been about one full percentage point below the unemployment rate for men for much of the recession. It is only fairly recently that the gender gap has begun to close. The unemployment rate is now 8.3 percent for men, 8.1 percent for women.

“That’s why many people have called this a man-cession,” said Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Men have fared worse in the recession, she said, mainly because industries such as construction and manufacturing – male-dominated industries – have been harder hit than education and health care – female-dominated sectors.

Furchtgott-Roth said she couldn’t think of any Obama policies that have led to a slower recovery for women.

“Obama’s policies have been anti-growth,” she said. “But if anything, they have been anti-male jobs.”

For example, she said, his policies have hurt coal mining and oil drilling, which are typically male-dominated jobs, whereas the health care law will expand the health care industry, which should disproportionately help women.

It was a powerful concept, but Santorum could not manage to execute it. He fused one gimmick (a concessionary tax rate for manufacturing industry) to the generic Republican platform that favors the old and the wealthy over the young and the striving.

To some degree, Santorum was constrained by inner factors: his own strong ideological commitments.

But even more, he was constrained by the Republican campaign map. The activist economic program needed to accomplish what Santorum declared he wished to accomplish—stabilize working-class employment and thus working-class families—is simply anathema to the donors, media institutions, and activists who sway Republican primaries.

Santorum dwindled into the candidate of ideological purity. It’s a strange kind of working-class champion who also sees eye-to-eye with the Club for Growth and the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Yet the need Santorum identified remains a genuine need indeed. Is there some way for the party of markets and enterprise to speak for the economic aspirations of a larger segment of the population than Santorum’s party speaks for today? For that matter, than Santorum himself was ever able to speak to?

The person who finds that way will be the next Republican president. And I greatly fear that we won’t see another Republican president until that way is found.

“Unfortunately for car companies,” Jordan Weissmann noted at TheAtlantic.com a couple weeks back, “today’s teens and twenty-somethings don’t seem all that interested in buying a set of wheels. They’re not even particularly keen on driving.”

Now a major new report from Benjamin Davis and Tony Dutzik at the Frontier Group and Phineas Baxandall, at the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, documents this unprecedented trend across a wide variety of indicators.

What has been happening lately is that conventional wisdom, including among people with influence over policy, has taken that little uptick at the right as evidence that it’s time to sound the all-clear, time to call off efforts to boost the economy and worry about inflation instead. This was a terrible misjudgment: we’ve barely made a dent in the employment decline that followed the financial crisis, and are still a very long way from full recovery..

And you can’t even count on the trend continuing to be favorable — which was the message of last month’s numbers.

I was for more stimulus before those numbers came out; I’m still for more stimulus now. The only difference is that it might be a bit easier today than two days ago to argue against unjustified complacency.

The US economy added 120,000 jobs during March, lower than estimates suggested, while the unemployment rate fell slightly to 8.2%.

Analysts had predicted a fourth straight month with job growth of more than 200,000.

President Barack Obama’s electoral prospects are widely seen as linked to the economy and the jobs market.

Employment has been rising for the past six months, but the jobless rate has been stuck above 8% since early 2009.

The Department of Labor’s data shows the smallest growth in employment since October 2011.

These observations have huge implications for policy. Let me stress two implications, in particular:

1. The prevalence of zero-change wages constitutes overwhelming evidence that we’re suffering from lack of demand, not lack of supply. It also undercuts one of the favorite arguments of those claiming that we really do have a supply-side problem, the persistence of (low) inflation and positive wage growth despite the low level of employment. The reason we have positive wage growth is that workers with a good bargaining position are still managing to eke out increases, while those without aren’t facing wage cuts. More on that later today, when I have time.

2. The stickiness of wages even in the United States — which has one of the most “flexible”, aka brutal, labor markets in the advanced world, makes it clear just how huge the costs of the eurozone strategy of “internal devaluation” — getting wages down in peripheral economies, until competitiveness is regained — really is. By asking that Ireland, Spain, Portugal achieve double-digit falls in nominal wages, the Germans and the ECB are actually demanding something that basically never happens.

Very important stuff.

Oh, and someone is sure to chime in and say that this proves that the solution to unemployment is to make wages more flexible. No, it isn’t: in a liquidity trapped, deleveraging economy lower wages would actually worsen the situation.

The US central bank is concerned that the gains in employment recently will dissipate if growth does not pick up.

Some at the Federal Reserve “perceived a non-negligible risk that improvements in employment could diminish as the year progressed,” said the minutes of the March meeting.

In March, the Fed decided again to keep interest rates at record lows until at least late 2014.

The US unemployment rate is down to 8.3%, the lowest for three years.

Employment has been rising for the past six months, but the jobless rate has been stuck above 8% since early 2009.

The number of new jobs being created has been consistently above 200,000 in each of the past three months, fuelling hopes that the US recovery is gathering pace.

At the March meeting, the Fed’s staff revised the central bank’s near-term forecast for real gross domestic product (GDP) growth upwards slightly.

“Labour market conditions had continued to improve and unemployment had declined in recent months,” the Fed said.

“But almost all members saw the unemployment rate as still elevated relative to levels that they viewed as consistent with the committee’s mandate over the longer run.”

That’s the bottom line: the Fed controls credit conditions, except when we’re in a liquidity trap and it’s pushing on a string. Everything else — all the talk about banks creating money, and yes, all the gotchas my critics think they’ve found in what I’m saying — is irrelevant to the actual economic discussion. And it’s really, really a waste of time to obsess over the fact that the Fed currently gets to point A by choosing r* instead of B*.

**Update II: Among the smart and skeptical responses to this stat, please see this post on the origin of the 9% figure. And don’t miss the comment thread on this page between SteveInch and CTW34 with links to Consumer Expenditure Survey data. In brief, the CES reports that families making under $15,000 spend between 3% and 9% of their income on a “Miscellaneous” category, in which lotteries and games of chance are a subcategory.

But we should not allow events in the court to completely overshadow another, almost equally disturbing spectacle. For on Thursday Republicans in the House of Representatives passed what was surely the most fraudulent budget in American history.

And when I say fraudulent, I mean just that. The trouble with the budget devised by Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, isn’t just its almost inconceivably cruel priorities, the way it slashes taxes for corporations and the rich while drastically cutting food and medical aid to the needy. Even aside from all that, the Ryan budget purports to reduce the deficit — but the alleged deficit reduction depends on the completely unsupported assertion that trillions of dollars in revenue can be found by closing tax loopholes.

And we’re talking about a lot of loophole-closing. As Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center points out, to make his numbers work Mr. Ryan would, by 2022, have to close enough loopholes to yield an extra $700 billion in revenue every year. That’s a lot of money, even in an economy as big as ours. So which specific loopholes has Mr. Ryan, who issued a 98-page manifesto on behalf of his budget, said he would close?

None. Not one. He has, however, categorically ruled out any move to close the major loophole that benefits the rich, namely the ultra-low tax rates on income from capital. (That’s the loophole that lets Mitt Romney pay only 14 percent of his income in taxes, a lower tax rate than that faced by many middle-class families.)

So what are we to make of this proposal? Mr. Gleckman calls it a “mystery meat budget ,” but he’s being unfair to mystery meat. The truth is that the filler modern food manufacturers add to their products may be disgusting — think pink slime — but it nonetheless has nutritional value. Mr. Ryan’s empty promises don’t. You should think of those promises, instead, as a kind of throwback to the 19th century, when unregulated corporations bulked out their bread with plaster of paris and flavored their beer with sulfuric acid.

Come to think of it, that’s precisely the policy era Mr. Ryan and his colleagues are trying to bring back.

Not all boomers are as lucky as we were. I know plenty of folks (especially women) who can’t afford to retire and need every cent of Old Age Security they’ll get. Yet I also know that lots of younger people won’t have it as good as we did. You want a union job at a car plant? You’ll make a lot less than your elders do, and you will never catch up. The airline industry will never pay what it once did either. Students today typically graduate with $25,000 worth of debt, then take a few more years to latch on to the job market. The modest house my mom helped me buy now costs a modest fortune.

As for an inheritance, the Millennials shouldn’t count on one. Unlike our own parents, who thought it was immoral to dip into their capital, we boomers would rather spend our savings than preserve them. Whatever money we have left after travelling the world will disappear pretty fast once we check into that upscale assisted-living home, at $7,000 a month. Did I mention that we’ll live forever?

We boomers have been the biggest winners from the social-welfare state. Today that state is stacked against the young. In Canada, we spend twice as much of our national income on health care as we do on education – but health care mainly benefits the old. According to a recent C.D. Howe report, annual health-care costs for a person over 65 are three to four times greater than for someone under 44. For a person over 85, they’re 12 times greater. As the boomers age, the math gets ugly. By the 2020s, nearly 17 per cent of Canada’s GDP will be spent on health care – up from 12 per cent today.

You know where this is going, don’t you? The welfare state as we know it can’t last. The rollbacks to the OAS are just the start of broader changes. Some time in the next few years everybody will have to start paying more for health care, through higher taxes, private insurance, means testing, user fees or some mix of those things. This will affect future generations a lot more than it will us. The boomers’ kids, and grandkids, will never get a deal as good as we have.

Should we boomers feel guilty about this? I think so. We like to say we earned it, and I guess, in part, we did. But we also won the birth-year lottery. Perhaps we shouldn’t cling so stubbornly to our entitlements. Perhaps we owe something to the future. Perhaps it’s time to pay it forward.

Business groups that worked hard to install a Republican majority in the House equated Republican control with a business-friendly environment. But the majority is first and foremost a conservative political force, and on key issues, its ideology is not always aligned with commercial interests that helped finance election victories.

“Free market is not always the same as pro-business,” said Barney Keller, spokesman for the conservative political action committee Club for Growth.

There could be real-world consequences to the conservative rebellion. The 90-day extension of the highway trust fund that House Republican leaders say they will pass this week in lieu of a broad highway bill would keep existing projects moving for now. But business groups say few new government-funded infrastructure projects can get under way without longer-range certainty about federal backing.

The White House on Friday named Jim Yong Kim , the president of Dartmouth College and a global health expert, as its nominee to lead the World Bank .

That makes Dr. Kim the front-runner to take the helm of the multinational development institution on June 30, when its current president, Robert B. Zoellick, will step down at the end of his five-year term. Tradition has held that Washington selects the head of the World Bank and Europe the leader of its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund, since they were founded during World War II .

Dr. Kim’s name was not among those widely bandied about since Mr. Zoellick announced his plans to move on last month. Highly respected among global health experts, Dr. Kim is an anthropologist and a physician who co-founded the nonprofit Partners in Health and a former director of the department of H.I.V. /AIDS at the World Health Organization.

“The leader of the World Bank should have a deep understanding of both the role that development plays in the world and the importance of creating conditions where assistance is no longer needed,” President Obama said Friday. “It’s time for a development professional to lead the world’s largest development agency.”

In a statement, Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary and an alumnus of Dartmouth, praised Dr. Kim, with whom he is friendly: “Development is his lifetime commitment and it is his passion. And in a world with so much potential to improve living standards, we have a unique opportunity to harness that passion and experience at the helm of the World Bank.”

The White House had scrutinized Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts; Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary and Obama economic adviser; and Susan E. Rice, the United States ambassador for the United Nations, for the World Bank job.

But all three might make good candidates for high-ranking administration positions in the event that President Obama won a second term. Moreover, President Obama wanted to name a development expert, particularly one with experience aiding the world’s poorest. That led the White House to select Dr. Kim.

President Obama was particularly drawn to Dr. Kim’s work in poor countries, a senior administration official said, as well as his personal history as an immigrant from South Korea, a country that was impoverished 50 years ago but has since vaulted into high-income status.

So if economics can’t fairly convey the price of a nanny, what does? Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, a director at Columbia University’s National Center for Children and Families, reassured me that academics know, roughly, nothing about how nannies impact children. There has not been any sort of serious study on nanny quality, she says, because it would be nearly impossible to get permission from nannies (often paid under the table) or their employers. Also, most child-development research is dedicated to at-risk children, and the kids of people with the resources to hire nannies don’t typically qualify.

Brooks-Gunn did, however, have some advice for what can make a good nanny. The single-most important characteristic is the extent to which a nanny is responsive to the child’s mood and interests. Brooks-Gunn said that when she chose a nanny, she simply handed her son to every candidate she interviewed and chose the one who responded most sensitively.

What this says is that the system that has provided workable insurance coverage to many (but not enough) Americans is coming apart at the seams. And this in turn means that if health reform goes down, we’re going to be looking at a wave of misery spreading across the land.

If you’re one of those people worried about the collapse of traditional society and nostalgic for the days when women knew their place… you probably won’t be reading Feministing. But if you did, you’d be thrilled to see this infographic from The National Journal, showing that women make less than men — they even make up 44% of the workforce!

WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department announced on Monday that it had finished selling the $225 billion in mortgage-backed securities it bought to help stabilize the markets during the worst of the financial crisis.

The government ended up making a $25 billion profit on the securities, which are guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-owned mortgage finance companies. The profit came from interest payments, principal and rising prices for the securities, the department said.

“The successful sale of these securities marks another important milestone in the wind-down of the government’s emergency financial crisis response efforts,” Mary Miller, assistant secretary for financial markets, said in a statement. “This program helped support the housing market during a critical moment for our nation’s economy and delivered a substantial profit for taxpayers.”

Treasury bought $225 billion in mortgage-backed securities in 2008 and 2009 as part of a wide-ranging effort to stabilize the housing and financial markets, an effort started by the Bush administration and continued and amplified under President Obama.

In March 2011, the Treasury Department announced that it would start to sell off what remained of its portfolio. To avoid disturbing the still-fragile housing finance market, it limited sales to $10 billion a month, and said it would discontinue the sell-off if any market disturbances occurred.

Thus far, Treasury’s sale of its mortgage-backed securities portfolio has provided a lucrative return to the taxpayer. But it is only one piece of a broad and expensive effort to prevent the collapse of the financial system and housing market.

The government also put Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under federal conservatorship in 2008, and the taxpayer has spent about $150 billion bailing out the two government-sponsored enterprises.

Estimates vary, but the Federal Housing Finance Agency projects the ultimate cost to the taxpayer for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could be $121 billion to $193 billion, depending on the strength of the housing market and other variables.

Among all the elements of Mitt Romney ’s 59-point economic plan, his vow to crack down on China’s trade policy would seem the most out of place.

That is not because his promise to label China a “currency manipulator” and impose tariff penalties is unique. Plenty of politicians in both parties talk tough about Beijing.

What is unusual is that Mr. Romney, a former financial executive identified with Republicans’ free-trade, pro-business wing, has promised to go further than Presidents Obama or George W. Bush in confronting China. Some other business-friendly Republicans warn that his approach could set off a counterproductive trade war that would damage the United States economy.

Just a thought: the latest conservative line is that America may be recovering, but the recovery would be much faster if it weren’t for Obama. Also, the same people believe that the Cameron government in the UK is wonderful, and we should be doing austerity here too.

So congratulations, America, your quasi-governmental housing entity is about to subcontract out mass-landlording/slumlording jobs to the likes of John Paulson and Warren Buffett, so that they can add to their bottom lines collecting rent payments in the middle of a nationwide housing slump.

As one hedge fund analyst put it to me this morning: “Help inflate the bubble, create a foreclosure crisis, buy homes in bulk, and rent them out to the same average homeowner.”

Is this what we had in mind when we created the “ownership society” – helping billionaires collect your rent?

In what has become a weekly ritual, President Obama on Thursday defended his administration’s energy policy, in the face of relentlessly rising gasoline prices, to an American public that believes he can do more to ease the pain at the pump.

Mr. Obama cycled through now-familiar themes, promoting his record of increased domestic oil and gas production; stricter fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks; and investments in alternative sources of energy, like biofuels, wind and solar power. The administration’s energy policy has been the focus of many speeches the president has given in recent weeks.

But on Thursday he delivered a notably sarcastic rebuttal to his Republican presidential challengers, particularly Newt Gingrich , who has promised, if elected, to bring down gas prices to $2.50 a gallon, and has ridiculed the president’s talk of making fuel from algae .

Without naming Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Obama said these gibes – by people “who are running for a certain office” – revealed a streak of ignorance similar to those who predicted that cars would not supplant horse-drawn buggies or that television would never elbow out radio.

“If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail, they must have been founding members of the Flat Earth Society,” Mr. Obama said to a cheering crowd at Prince George’s Community College here. “They would not have believed the earth was round.”

Turning the spotlight on the remarks of his opponents may make sense because Mr. Obama’s defense of his role in rising gas prices rests on an uncomfortable claim: he cannot do much about it. It was a theme he struck again on Thursday

“There’s no silver bullet,” the president declared. “Anybody who tells you otherwise isn’t really looking for a solution; they’re trying to ride the political wave of the moment.”

The nation is still recovering from a crushing recession that sent unemployment hovering above nine percent for two straight years. The president, mindful of soaring deficits, is pushing bold action to shore up the nation’s balance sheet. Cloaking himself in the language of class warfare, he calls on a hostile Congress to end wasteful tax breaks for the rich. “We’re going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share,” he thunders to a crowd in Georgia. Such tax loopholes, he adds, “sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary – and that’s crazy.”

Preacherlike, the president draws the crowd into a call-and-response. “Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver,” he demands, “or less?”

The crowd, sounding every bit like the protesters from Occupy Wall Street, roars back: “MORE!”

The year was 1985. The president was Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Today’s Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan – which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometimes required to cure ruinous deficits – is dead and gone. Instead, the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us.

Modern-day Republicans have become, quite simply, the Party of the One Percent – the Party of the Rich.

American families have been plagued by higher oil and gasoline prices over the past several years despite a significant increase in domestic oil production and rigs, and decline in consumption . But while high prices threaten the economy and family budgets, they enrich American oil companies with huge profits. Yet it appears that House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) proposed FY 2013 budget resolution would retain a decade’s worth of oil tax breaks worth $40 billion . And his budget would cut billions of dollars from investments to develop alternative fuels and clean energy technologies that would serve as substitutes for oil and help protect middle-class families from volatile energy prices as well as create jobs. In short, the Ryan budget compounds the cost of high oil and gasoline prices on the middle class.

Last year the average gasoline price was $3.58 per gallon — the highest since at least 1976 — so it’s little surprise that the big five oil companies — BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell — made a combined record profit of $137 billion in 2011. These companies had nearly $60 billion in cash reserves, too. Yet under the Ryan budget it seems that these and other Big Oil and gas companies would continue to benefit from $4 billion in annual tax breaks.

Instead of ending Big Oil tax breaks, Rep. Ryan’s proposed FY 2013 budget would slash funding for investments in clean energy research, development, deployment, and commercialization, along with other energy programs. The plan calls for a $3 billion cut in energy programs in FY 2013 alone. From 2013 to 2017 the Ryan budget would spend a paltry total of $150 million over these five years on these programs—which is barely 20 percent of what was invested in only 2012.

The latest House Republican budget plan asks low-income and middle-class Americans to shoulder the entire burden of deficit reduction while simultaneously delivering massive tax breaks to the richest 1 percent and preserving huge giveaways to Big Oil. It’s a recipe for repeating the mistakes of the Bush administration, during which middle-class incomes stagnated and only the privileged few enjoyed enormous gains.

Hours after he secured the endorsement of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney credited his brother, President George W. Bush, with keeping the country from a great depression in 2008.

“I keep hearing the president say he’s responsible for keeping the country out of a Great Depression,” Romney said at a town hall in Arbutus, Maryland. “No, no, no, that was President George W. Bush and [then-Treasury Secretary] Hank Paulson.”

With the economy turning around, Romney appears intent on denying President Barack Obama ownership of the recovery, as he’s previously argued that any reduction in unemployment has occurred despite Obama’s policies.

Romney’s statement comes in the midst of a tough day for his campaign, following a self-inflicted wound by strategist Eric Fehrnstrom, who compared his candidate’s shift to the general election to shaking an Etch-A-Sketch.

The US has imposed duties on Chinese solar panel manufacturers after it said that they received unfair subsidies.

Chinese exporters into the US - including Suntech - will now face customs tariffs of between 2.9% and 4.73%, the Commerce Department said.

In 2011, imports of solar cells from China into the US were valued at $3.1bn (£1.96bn), it added.

The price of solar panels dropped more than 30% last year, mainly linked to cheaper panels made in China.

“Countervailable subsidies are financial assistance from foreign governments that benefit the production of goods from foreign companies,” the Commerce Department said.

China’s Suntech, the world’s largest producer of solar panels, will now face duties of 2.9% to offset what the US said is its subsidy from the Chinese government.

Another firm, Changzhou Trina Solar Energy, will receive duties of 4.73%.

All others face duties of 3.61%.

US customs will collect deposits equivalent to these amounts now and the Commerce Department will make a final ruling in June.

The US will also rule on whether China’s solar panel output is violating its anti-dumping rules on 17 May.

Chinese firms have said that they are not the only ones that receive government help - for example, the US has subsidies to encourage people to install solar panels.

China has already said it will launch its own investigation into US government support for renewable energy.

Defying almost all conventional wisdom about the 2012 election, Rick Santorum said the race would not turn on the economy and so it wasn’t important if unemployment and growth rates rose or fell.

Seeking to sharply contrast himself with Mitt Romney, Mr. Santorum waved away economics as he went after his chief rival as insufficiently conservative in his core values.

“I don’t care what the unemployment rate’s going to be,” Mr. Santorum said on Monday, the day before the Illinois primary. “It doesn’t matter. My campaign doesn’t hinge on unemployment rates and growth rates. There’s something more foundational that’s going on here.”

Earlier in the day, Mr. Romney had delivered a major speech at the campus of the University of Chicago in which he lambasted President Obama’s economic policies, presenting himself as the Republicans’ best possible opponent. Mr. Santorum, in effect, dismissed Mr. Romney’s wheelhouse issue as irrelevant.

A note to myself: European industrial production post 1929, from League of Nations, versus European industrial production post 2007, from Eurostat. Better this time, but not as much as you might think — and stalling:

US factory production rose 0.3% in February, the third monthly increase in a row, according to figures from the US Federal Reserve.

Overall industrial production in the US was flat with declines in mining and car manufacturing.

In a separate release, the Labor Department announced that US consumer prices rose by 0.4% in February.

However, 80% of the increase in prices was driven by higher petrol costs, caused by the rising cost of oil.

The rise in prices was the largest in 10 months, but so-called “core” prices - which strip out petrol and energy costs - were almost unchanged, increasing by 0.1%.

The factory data is the latest in a string of positive signs for the US economy, which created a better than expected 227,000 jobs in February, 31,000 of which were in the manufacturing sector.

“If you look over the last few months, manufacturing output growth is actually accelerating, and accelerating to a very strong level,” said Paul Ashworth, chief US economist at Capital Economics.

There may be no number stamped more frequently on the American landscape than the price of gas. And as the average price has climbed toward $4 a gallon nationwide, it has generated abundant chatter about the threat to the economic recovery, and to incumbent politicians.

Republicans have seized on the issue to attack President Obama’s management of the economy. The president has responded with speeches defending his energy policies, including increased domestic oil production.

But there is surprisingly little evidence that gas prices deserve an outsize reputation for economic and political influence.

Studies suggest that most voters agree with Ms. Hawks: they are angry about gas prices, but other factors, like the economy and the personal qualities of candidates, ultimately determine their votes.

Gas prices influence voters indirectly, because rising prices can slow the pace of growth. But the influence is modest, because spending on oil and its derivatives makes up only a small part of the nation’s economic activity. Gas purchases account for less than 4 percent of household spending. Prices would need to increase by at least 28 percent to lift that share by a single percentage point. So far this year, they have jumped by 15 percent.

“Presidential elections are based on evaluations of presidential performance and on the performance of the economy. You can’t reduce that to one small issue,” said Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University. “Are gas prices part of the equation that people think about? They probably are, but only a small piece.”

Rising gas prices also make Americans less confident in the nation’s economic prospects and less approving of political leaders, according to public opinion surveys. But these, too, are small effects. One study by a political scientist estimated that the impact of changes in unemployment was 27 times greater than the impact of equivalent changes in gas prices.

In part, the difference is that Americans are divided as to whether politicians should be held responsible.

In 2005, when Willow was 7, the housing market was booming. Home prices in some Florida neighborhoods nearly doubled from one month to the next. Her family moved into a big house; her mom became a real estate agent.

But as Willow moved from childhood to adolescence, the market turned, and the neighborhood emptied out. “Everyone is getting foreclosed on here,” she says.

After the collapse, Willow’s mom started working with investors who wanted to bid on cheap, foreclosed homes. Sometimes Willow tagged along.


One day, she went to a house that an investor wanted to flip. “It was filled with all kinds of stuff!” Willow says. “I was like, ‘I can sell this stuff if he’d want to let me have it.’ “

That was fine with the investor. So Willow sold the furniture and appliances from the house on Craigslist. She did the same thing with a bunch more houses. After a while, she was clearing about $500 a month, and saving a lot of it.

One day, Willow’s mom, Shannon, saw a two-bedroom, concrete-block home on auction for $12,000 — down from $100,000 at the peak of the bubble. Shannon was telling her husband about the house, when Willow piped up.

“I was like, ‘What if I bought a house? That would be crazy,’ ” Willow says.

Willow wound up splitting the house with her mom. Willow plans to buy her mom out in the next few years, and put her name on the title when she turns 18.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, extolled the measure, passed on a bipartisan vote of 74 to 22 , as “a jobs bill in the true sense of the word.”

“I hope the House will take this up and not listen to this shrill voice that makes up so much of the Republican caucus in the House,” he said.

But the nearly three million jobs expected to be “saved or created” by the measure largely come from construction jobs that stand to be lost if federally financed projects grind to a halt on April 1, when money from the highway trust fund could no longer be used.

That deadline appears to be weighing heavily on House Republicans, who initially had wanted to use their measure to change federal transportation policy fundamentally by linking infrastructure spending to the expansion of oil drilling from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to the outer continental shelf off the East Coast.

The five-year House proposal was stymied by a coalition of opponents in both parties, and Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio, one of its initial backers, has all but abandoned it.

“As the speaker said, the plan as it stands right now is to let the Senate pass a bill and take up something that looks like it,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for Mr. Boehner, “unless the House coalesces around a better alternative, which we are actively pursuing.”

The Senate bill, written by one of the chamber’s most liberal Democrats, Senator Barbara Boxer of California, and one of its most conservative Republicans, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, consolidates 196 federal transportation programs to about a dozen, while giving more flexibility to the states to decide transportation priorities. But it largely keeps the scope of federal highway, transit and other surface transportation projects intact. Senators kept the duration of the bill short, to two years, because of the difficulty in paying for its programs as gasoline tax revenues slide.

President Obama, as well as highway and transit advocates, had pressed for a big, upfront increase in infrastructure spending to lift the economy and address the nation’s aging roads and bridges. But considering that House Republicans last year were considering a 35 percent cut to transportation spending, level funding may have been the best that advocates could hope for, said Rob Healy, vice president for government affairs at the American Public Transportation Association.

Rather than raising the gas tax, as many transportation advocates suggest, the Senate jury-rigged the bill with an array of revenue provisions, tapping a trust fund established to clean up leaking underground storage tanks and adjusting the way pension fund contributions and liabilities are calculated.

Taxpayers for Common Sense, a watchdog group, criticized the use of 10 years of revenue from such provisions to pay for a two-year transportation bill.

“That’s kind of how Congress is approaching every problem,” cobbling together short-term fixes without addressing long-term problems, said Jeff Shoaf, head of Congressional relations for the Associated General Contractors of America, which nonetheless strongly supported the bill.

Mr. Shoaf said the legislation would spur hiring in the construction industry, where unemployment hit 17.1 percent in February. With infrastructure spending stable for two years, construction firms should begin buying equipment and hiring permanent workers, he said.

North Dakota has had a major employment boom, because 15,000 resource jobs are a big deal in a state with fewer than 700,000 people. Pennsylvania has not; it has done a bit better than the nation as a whole, but that probably has as much to do with the absence of a big housing bubble as with fracking.

And what this shows is that even if you believe in claims that lifting environmental restrictions and all that would lead to a big expansion in drilling, mining, and all that, the effect on overall US employment would be tiny; using North Dakota as a model is just silly.

A number of people have asked me for a quick, easy explanation of the difference between a government and a family — basically, what’s wrong with the argument that when times are tough the government should tighten its belt.

I’m working on it. But maybe we can use Greece as a quick illustration of the point.

After all, you could view Greece as being like a family that overspent, got itself into debt, and whose members now have to do all the things families do when they get in that position: slash spending on inessentials, postpone medical care and other big expenses, quit their jobs and reduce their incomes — oh, wait.

That’s the key point, of course. When a family tightens its belt it doesn’t put itself out of a job. When a government tightens its belt in a depressed economy, it puts lots of people out of jobs; and this is a negative even from the government’s own, narrowly fiscal point of view, since a shrinking economy means less revenue.

Now, you might argue that slashing government spending doesn’t actually cost jobs — that is, you might argue that if you spent the past few years in a cave or a conservative think tank, cut off from any information about how austerity is working in practice. For the results of austerity policies in Europe have been as good a test as you ever get in macroeconomics, and without exception big cuts in government spending have been followed by big declines in GDP.

So lose the belt; it’s a really bad metaphor.

These days, austerity-induced depressions are visible all around Europe’s periphery. Greece is the worst case, with unemployment soaring to 20 percent even as public services, including health care, collapse. But Ireland, which has done everything the austerity crowd wanted, is in terrible shape too, with unemployment near 15 percent and real G.D.P. down by double digits. Portugal and Spain are in similarly dire straits.

And austerity in a slump doesn’t just inflict vast suffering. There is growing evidence that it is self-defeating even in purely fiscal terms, as the combination of falling revenues due to a depressed economy and worsened long-term prospects actually reduces market confidence and makes the future debt burden harder to handle. You have to wonder how countries that are systematically denying a future to their young people — youth unemployment in Ireland, which used to be lower than in the United States, is now almost 30 percent, while it’s near 50 percent in Greece — are supposed to achieve enough growth to service their debt.

This was not what was supposed to happen. Two years ago, as many policy makers and pundits began calling for a pivot from stimulus to austerity, they promised big gains in return for the pain. “The idea that austerity measures could trigger stagnation is incorrect,” Jean-Claude Trichet, then the president of the European Central Bank, declared in June 2010. Instead, he insisted, fiscal discipline would inspire confidence, and this would lead to economic growth.

And every slight uptick in an austerity economy has been hailed as proof that the policy works. Irish austerity has been proclaimed a success story not once but twice, first in the summer of 2010, then again last fall; each time the supposed good news quickly evaporated.

I don’t look at the WSJ much these days; it really has gone downhill since you-know-who took over, and I find that I almost never find anything there that isn’t covered better either in the Times or in the FT.

But following a link to Allan Meltzer led to to a report that’s bad even by current WSJ standards: Stephen Moore telling us to compare California with North Dakota to see what works economically. Because a resource boom in a state whose total population is basically that of one neighborhood in LA, as compared with a slump caused by the mother of all housing bubbles and its aftermath, totally shows that free markets rool.

Incidentally, California’s job gain since the bottom in 2009 is, if I’m not mistaken, bigger than the entire adult population of North Dakota.

Judging from comments on my North Dakota post , there’s a lot of confusion about when and why differences in scale make comparisons between economies invalid.

The crucial thing to get is that size per se isn’t the issue; it’s whether what is going on in the small economy could be replicated in the large economy.

I mean, we all know that airplane designs can be tested with miniature models in wind tunnels, that tsunamis can be modeled in tanks that fit in a (large) room, and so on. Small-scale versions of big phenomena are perfectly OK. The baby-sitting coop teaches us a lot about the global economic slump.

But when you’re looking at, say, a resource boom — which is what North Dakota is all about — you have to ask whether a comparable resource boom is possible in a much more populous state, or the United States as a whole. One commenter declared that there’s as much oil under California as there is under North Dakota; quite possibly. The question is, how big a deal would extracting that oil be in a state with 50 times North Dakota’s population; how much difference would it make to, say, the state unemployment rate? And the answer of course is virtually none. To have a North Dakota-type boom in California you’d have to find 50 times as much oil; to have it nationally you’d have to find 500 times as much. Not likely.

And this is how you want to think about other examples. Is Iceland too small to be a useful model for other crisis countries? Well, it could be; Iceland’s export sector is, thanks to its small size, not very diverse, and if the recovery had been all about fish, or aluminum, it wouldn’t be much of a lesson to anyone else. As it happens, however, that’s not what it’s about.

I guess the general point is that when trying to learn from some country or region’s experience, you should always ask, “Is this place a reasonably good model for other places?” It’s not a matter of head counts or acreage, it’s about the story.

President Obama is not claiming mission accomplished, but on Friday he hailed the latest monthly report of jobs growth by saying, “Day by day, we’re restoring this economy from crisis.”

While the addition of 230,000 private-sector jobs in February was not enough to further shrink the 8.3 percent unemployment rate, the news did keep alive a positive trend that is perhaps the best Mr. Obama can hope for as he campaigns for re-election arguing that his policies are working.

Mr. Obama, speaking from the floor of a new manufacturing plant in this election battleground state, said the nation had “come a long way,” creating almost 4 million jobs in the past two years. But that total is about half the number of jobs lost in the recession and financial crisis since 2007. As usual, Mr. Obama tempered his optimism, having learned from the experience of the past two years that global events like the debt crisis in Europe can unexpectedly put a damper on economic growth.

In what has become almost routine on each Friday the government releases the monthly jobs report, Mr. Obama traveled outside Washington to deliver his response from a factory floor, reflecting his emphasis on the manufacturing sector. Not far from the state capital of Richmond, the site this month was Rolls-Royce North America’s Crosspointe plant, which makes precision-engineered discs for jet engines.

“More companies are bringing jobs back and investing in America,” Mr. Obama said. “And manufacturing is adding jobs for the first time since the 1990s.”

The US economy created 227,000 jobs in February, while the unemployment rate stayed at 8.3%, official figures have shown.

The rise in jobs added was above forecasts of an increase of 210,000 jobs, the Labor Department said.

The unemployment rate of 8.3% is still the lowest in nearly three years and comfortably below the level of much of last year.

US employment has been steadily rising over the past six months.

The number of new jobs being created has picked up pace to be consistently above 200,000 in each of the past three months, fuelling hopes that the US economy recovery is gathering pace and is less likely to need further economic stimulus.

Another positive note was provided by a revision to data showing that the economy had created 61,000 more jobs in December and January combined than was previously estimated.

Unemployment is one of the most hotly contested topics among the candidates battling to win November’s presidential election.

The House voted on Tuesday to ensure that the United States could impose duties on subsidized goods from China and Vietnam , overwhelmingly rejecting a conservative group’s attempt to portray it as a tax increase.

The bill, which was passed 370 to 39 and addresses a court ruling, now goes to President Obama, who is expected to sign it into law. The Senate passed the bill on Monday.

“China distorts the free market by giving enormous subsidies to its producers and exporters, and our companies and workers should not be expected to compete against the deep pockets of the Chinese government,” Dave Camp, a Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said during debate.

The Obama administration helped draw up the bipartisan bill after an appeals court ruled in December that the Commerce Department did not have authority to impose countervailing — or antisubsidy — duties on goods from “nonmarket economies.”

The decision endangered countervailing duties on about two dozen goods from China and Vietnam worth more than $4 billion in trade, and potential new duties in cases involving solar panels and turbine towers from China.

Supporters say current duties protect 80,000 American jobs. They cover steel, aluminum, paper, chemicals, other products from China and plastic shopping bags from Vietnam.

The vote gave both Republicans and Democrats a chance to show they are being tough on China, which many Americans see as an unfair trader. Last year, United States imports from China totaled a record $399.3 billion.

Separately, the United States began action on Tuesday at the World Trade Organization to open India’s market for poultry meat and eggs, saying an Indian ban on United States imports intended to stop the spread of bird flu was not based on sound science.

India’s ban in the name of protecting local poultry producers from losses caused by avian influenza is “clearly a case of disguising trade restrictions by invoking unjustified animal health concerns,” Ron Kirk, the United States trade representative, said.

The poultry industry welcomed the move, which it said could pry open a market for poultry exports conservatively valued at more than $300 million.

US investment bank Goldman Sachs swung to a loss in Asia for the first time since 2008 following declines in the Chinese stock market.

Goldman’s Asia division posted a loss of $103m (£65m) in 2011, compared with a $2.1bn profit in 2010.

The firm was hit by a dip in the value of its holdings in Industrial & Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), which generated a loss of $517m.

Chinese banks stocks were hurt last year amid fears over bad loans.

The fears were fanned further by concerns that the eurozone debt crisis and a weak recovery in the US might also hurt China’s economic growth.

As of November last year, Goldman held just under a 10% stake in the Hong Kong-listed shares of ICBC, which is China’s biggest bank.

One clear sign that the economy is improving: a Senate hearing featuring the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, ended ahead of schedule Thursday after the committee members ran out of questions.

It was one of the shortest and least contentious appearances that Mr. Bernanke has made on Capitol Hill since the recession started five years ago.

Mr. Bernanke repeated the Fed’s assessment, which he delivered most recently to a House committee on Wednesday, that the domestic economy would grow modestly this year despite higher oil prices and turbulence in Europe.

“We don’t see at this point that the very severe recession has permanently affected the growth potential of the U.S. economy,” Mr. Bernanke told the Senate Banking Committee.

He is required by law to appear before the committee twice a year to discuss the Fed’s management of the nation’s monetary policy.

Mr. Bernanke fielded a number of familiar critiques from Republican senators about the Fed’s efforts to accelerate the pace of growth, but the exchanges lacked the intensity of Mr. Bernanke’s previous appearances.

Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, asked Mr. Bernanke whether the Fed’s efforts to hold down interest rates were contributing to the rise in gasoline prices, by encouraging investors to buy oil and other commodities.

Mr. Bernanke said he saw no evidence of such an effect.

“The reason that we’ve seen these sharp movements has more to do with the international situation than with U.S. monetary policy,” he said.

Mr. Bernanke also renewed his calls, at the urging of Republicans on the committee, for Congress to adopt a long-term plan to reduce the government’s annual deficits.

He was in one respect more specific than he has been in the past, saying that Congress should aim to reduce the deficit over the next 10 to 15 years to reach a point where revenues cover all costs except interest payments.

Brian Palmer has a nice summary of the reasons behind the concentration of car companies in Michigan; basically, historical accident perpetuated by agglomeration economies.

What he doesn’t say is that there is a close relationship between such stories and the case for the auto bailout.

Agglomeration economies exist because the whole is more than the sum of the parts — because the network of suppliers, the skills, the interchange of knowledge supported by a geographical industry concentration in turn gives firms in that industry concentration an advantage over firms elsewhere. I have written a bit (pdf) about this sort of thing over the years.

Now, the existence of important agglomeration economies immediately implies that there are social consequences to the success or failure of an individual firm that aren’t captured by the profit and loss statement of that firm alone. Let General Motors fail, and the resulting collapse of its suppliers will hurt other firms too, possibly driving them out of business too.

You don’t want to overuse this sort of argument; it can all too easily be used to justify any and all industrial interventions. But it was surely a major consideration for the auto bailout — and a reason why hard-line opposition to any such action was bad economics.

As president of the Club for Growth , the politically active free-market advocacy group, Chris Chocola wields tremendous power, rating members of Congress on their fiscally conservative purism. Those who fail to meet the club’s tests can expect a club-backed primary opponent, or at least a negative advertising barrage that leaves them trembling.

Had he been in his increasingly influential position just a few years ago, Mr. Chocola would have almost certainly aimed heavy political fire at a fiscally straying Republican lawmaker from Indiana: himself. When he was in the House, from 2003 to 2007, Mr. Chocola voted for various pieces of legislation that are similar to the ones that his group now rails against.

They included a 2004 bill to lift the debt ceiling — which had no spending cuts, compared with the deal reached by Congress last year, that set more than $2 trillion in cuts in motion but that the club deplored — and a 2005 highway bill that lives in conservative infamy for its inclusion of the “Bridge to Nowhere” earmark, and one far less conservative than the House bill that Mr. Chocola now denounces.

He voted aye for an expensive expansion to the Medicare program in 2003, now viewed by many as a moment when the Republican Party lost its way on spending. (In contrast, Senator Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, a past president of the club, voted against the Medicare bill when he was in the House.)

If Mr. Chocola now holds the Republican world to a conservative fiscal orthodoxy he did not practice as a lawmaker, he does not see a problem. “The world has changed,” he said. “And some of my views have changed. I am not asking to be elected now.”

The club is indisputably a force to be reckoned with in Republican politics. It has played a key role in driving from office Senate veterans like Robert F. Bennett of Utah and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and has been instrumental in advancing the careers of rising Republican stars like Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah.

But many Republicans say the Club for Growth is holding members to impossible legislative standards in a city where their party remains a minority, and that it contributes to the gridlock that many Americans find toxic.

What’s more, many Republicans — most of whom are so afraid of the group that they will not talk about them on the record — say the Club for Growth and other conservative groups are running people once considered good conservatives out of town. Representative Fred Upton, the Michigan Republican who heads the Energy and Commerce Committee, is one of its targets.

“I don’t know about what the Club for Growth is doing,” said Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio. “But I can say this: Chairman Upton has done a marvelous job as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, led the effort to repeal Obamacare, led the effort to expose Solyndra, and he has got as conservative a voting record as you will find, and, frankly, I think he has done a marvelous job on behalf of Republicans in the House.”

The club was started in 1999 and is bankrolled by contributions from 75,000 members across the country.

In the 1999-2000 election cycle, the club’s political action committee bundled a little more than $1.4 million in direct contributions to candidates; in the 2009-10 period, the PAC bundled nearly $6 million, a spokesman said.

The club’s leaders focus on races where they know they can make a difference.

The club’s score card, which ranks lawmakers’ voting behavior based on limited-government principles, is set upon by Republicans like the Oscar nominations list by Hollywood, with everyone dying to know who ranks where, especially in election years.

The US economy grew by more than first thought in the fourth quarter of 2011, government figures have shown.

The economy grew at an annualised rate of 3% in the October to December quarter, the Commerce Department said, up from its previous estimate of 2.8%.

The growth estimate was revised up because consumers spent more than first thought, and businesses cut spending by much less.

Economists hope it could pave the way for stronger growth this year.

The chief of the US central bank says the US economy is continuing to recover, but that growth is bumpy and modest.

Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke was updating Congress on the health of the US economy.

He said the decline in unemployment has been more rapid than expected.

For much of last year, the jobless rate was stuck around 9%, but it started dropping at the end of last year and hit 8.3% in January.

In his speech, the Fed Chairman said that the labour market “remains far from normal”.

“The unemployment rate remains elevated, long-term unemployment is still near record levels and the number of persons working part-time for economic reasons is very high.” he said.

The speech contained no hints that Mr Bernanke is planning a third round of quantitative easing (QE). That is the central bank’s method of boosting the economy by buying up government bonds.

“Bernanke implied that the Fed was no closer to QE3… Investors were disappointed,” said Cary Leahey of Decision Economics in New York.

The report, called “China 2030,” and produced by the bank and the Development Research Center, the government research organization, calls on Beijing to complete the transition to a market economy, scale back the power of state-owned companies, encourage private enterprise and confront rising inequality and environmental degradation.

As remarkable as China’s growth has been over the past three decades, the study suggests that the country’s development pattern has been uneven and is unsustainable. The government should make significant changes, it says.

“The case for reform is compelling because China has now reached a turning point in its development path,” Robert B. Zoellick, president of the World Bank, said in a speech in Beijing on Monday, when the report was released. “Managing the transition from a middle-income to a high-income country will prove challenging; add to this a global environment that will likely remain uncertain and volatile for the foreseeable future, and the need for change assumes even greater importance.”

The release of the report comes at a critical juncture. China is now in the midst of a once-in-a-decade leadership transition, and the report’s proposals could help influence the way the next generation of leaders governs.

Analysts also have growing concerns that China’s economy is facing strong headwinds this year.

Economic weakness in Europe, Japan and the United States is threatening to dampen China’s export boom. After years of heavy investment in public works, there are worries here, too, about inflation, the mounting debt of local governments and the possibility that big state-owned banks could be at risk.

Mr. Zoellick said in news conferences on Monday that he was reassured that the government would undertake bold changes and that he expected China’s economy to remain strong this year, with a soft landing likely.

The 400-page report, however, says little about the immediate challenges facing China’s economy. Instead, it lays out a road map packed with recommendations that the authors hope will lead to gradual reforms introduced over many years, if not over a decade or more.

If all goes well and China undertakes serious changes, the study predicts, its economy could grow by about 8 percent a year for the next few years and could sustain average annual growth of about 6.6 percent for nearly 20 years.

With China preparing for a leadership change in late autumn and facing a longer-term contraction of its labor force, a flurry of reports is suggesting that the country needs to continue moving ahead with economic reforms, and in some cases confront entrenched interest groups like the powerful state-owned enterprises.

On Thursday, China’s central bank issued a detailed outline of a report calling for the country to ease some restrictions on investing elsewhere over the next three years, a move that would allow Chinese to take greater advantage of Western assets whose values have been depressed in the long economic slowdown. The report also suggested removing some limits on foreign buyers interested in Chinese stocks, bonds and real estate over the next 5 to 10 years.

On Monday, the World Bank is scheduled to release a five-volume report, prepared with the help of top advisers to the Chinese government, that will provide extensive, market-oriented prescriptions for how China can prevent growth from slowing considerably between now and 2030, as China’s labor force begins to shrink and grow old.

People briefed on the document said that it recommends limiting the influence of the vast state-owned enterprises, expanding research and innovation, protecting the poor and infirm, strengthening the tax system and investing in green energy and energy efficiency.

The lower-wage tier for restaurant work reflects a legacy of discrimination in labor regulation. Historically, sectors relying heavily on women and people of color, such as domestic work and farm work, have been excluded from critical labor protections.

But the inequity restaurant workers face isn’t just a bread-and-butter issue of wages. A national survey of several thousand restaurant workers found that:

90 percent lack paid sick days and 90 percent do not receive health insurance through their employers. One third of all female restaurant workers … lack any kind of health care, whether provided by their employer or otherwise.

Families suffer when parents can’t afford to take a day off to care for an ill child. And when sick food-service employees drag themselves to work, everyone is at risk. A majority of restaurant workers reported “going to work and cooking, preparing, or serving food while sick,” according to ROC’s study–a startling 70 percent among women. Imagine a bout of the flu in a hot, crowded kitchen, and how many hands touched your salad on its way to the table.

While they’re needlessly exposed to health risks, women are also acutely vulnerable to being sexually violated at work. According to ROC’s national survey of about 4,300 restaurant workers, some ten percent “reported that they or a co-worker had experienced sexual harassment in their restaurant.” The climate of abuse, the report found, is aggravated by employers’ failure to provide adequate workplace trainings or enforce formal rules against harassment.

ROC’s research reveals that the day-to-day hardships and indignities of restaurant work are compounded by long-term structural barriers of gender and racial segregation, which keep many women in marginal, irregular jobs with little hope of moving up from, say, server to manager.

Still, this could put Mr. Santorum at a disadvantage. If he is the nominee, the coverage might tend to place more emphasis on social policy, where his views are further removed from those of the median voter.

It should be mentioned, however, that Mr. Romney is no social moderate — at least based on his current issue positions. In fact, if you look at public statements that Mr. Romney has made recently , they are nearly as conservative as Mr. Santorum’s on social issues: slightly less so on issues like gay rights, but slightly more so on others like immigration.

Some of this, of course, is because Mr. Romney’s positions on some social issues were formerly more moderate when he was running for office in Massachusetts. It may also be because of Mr. Romney’s tone: he is somewhat less strident than Mr. Santorum on social issues, even though they don’t differ very much when you examine their actual policy positions.

Nevertheless, Mr. Romney will probably have an easier time maintaining a focus on economic policy if he gets to the general election. Although the electability question between Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum is debatable, that is a point in Mr. Romney’s favor.

Ireland such a success it's economy is not recovering

US consumer prices rose by 0.2% in January, driven by the rising cost of clothes and petrol, the US Labor Department has said.

The figures also showed that the annual rate of inflation was 2.9% last month, down from December’s rate of 3%.

However, core inflation - which strips out food and energy costs - rose to an annual rate of 2.3%.

The Federal Reserve has said it is not intending to raise interest rates until 2014 because inflation has stayed low.

The monthly increase was less than analysts had expected. Consumer price inflation hit a high of 3.9% in September.

The Labor Department said the fuel oil index rose 1.4%, as oil and petrol prices increased again after dropping late last year.

The average price for a gallon of petrol is now about $3.52, up 14 cents from last month.

Prices for fruits and vegetables fell 1.3% in January, the fourth consecutive monthly decline.

US carmaker General Motors made record profits in 2011 but unveiled huge losses in its European operations.

The firm made a profit of $7.6bn (£4.85bn) over the year, up 62% from 2010.

However, it lost $700m in Europe, which includes its UK Vauxhall plants in Ellesmere Port and Luton, and made a $100m loss in South America.

The firm, which faced bankruptcy two years ago, saw sales rise 7.6% last year to more than 9 million vehicles.

Much of its growth came from North America, where profits more than tripled to $7.19bn in 2011.

GM has announced it would give up to $7,000 each in bonuses to 47,500 eligible workers across the world - compared with $4,300 a year ago.