(Reuters) - The Federal Reserve has room to deliver additional monetary stimulus to boost the U.S. economy, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told a Congressional oversight panel in a letter.
"There is scope for further action by the Federal Reserve to ease financial conditions and strengthen the recovery," Bernanke wrote to the committee's chairman, Representative Darrell Issa, in a letter obtained by Reuters on Friday.
Bernanke at the end of next week will give a closely watched speech at an annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which will be closely watched for clues into the prospect of further bond-buying from the Fed.
A class-action lawsuit against JP Morgan Chase over multi-billion dollar losses racked up by its UK-based traders, including one nicknamed the “London Whale”, is being led by a pension fund from Sweden and three from America.
US District Judge George Daniels ruled this week that claims faced by JP Morgan in New York should be combined into a class-action suit, a legal device that allows other investors who claim they are owed compensation to join.
The chief plaintiffs include Sjunde AP-Fonden, a Swedish state pension fund, as well as the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System, the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System and the Oregon Public Employee Retirement Fund.
In a particularly bloody night of this brutal Chicago summer, 19 people were shot throughout Chicago Thursday night into early Friday morning, including 13 shot between 9:15 and 9:45 p.m. During that period 8 people—many of them teens—were shot at 79th Street and Essex Avenue. The terror ended just after 1:30 a.m. Friday, when a 17-year-old was shot in the Homan Square neighborhood. The overnight shootings were concentrated in Chicago’s south and west neighborhoods, which have had a devastating summer with shootings and homicides in the gang-plagued area. In the first 20 days of August, 38 people were killed.
It happens—and in many states there are no laws to keep rapists from terrorizing their victims all over again. Read on, Todd Akin.
The debate over Rep. Todd Akin's widely condemned comments on "legitimate rape" has largely centered on abortion and Republican efforts to outlaw the procedure, even in cases of rape. But the controversy has also uncovered a little-discussed issue: When some rape victims do choose to give birth to a child conceived through sexual assault, they find that the legal door is left wide open for their victimization to continue. It sounds unfathomable, but in many states the law makes it possible for rapists to assert their parental rights and use custody proceedings as a weapon against their victims.
As Rupert Murdoch’s daughter, Elisabeth Murdoch, got on stage at a big media shindig in Edinburgh today, many wondered whether she would deny the line attributed to her from last summer, at the height of the phone hacking scandal that engulfed the Murdoch family, namely that “James and Rebekah (Brooks) fucked the company.”
Today’s MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh Film and Television festival provided a clear cut answer. Three years after her brother James laid down his vision on the same platform – Elisabeth was at pains to demolish everything he stood for.
TIME just published “The Party of No,” an article adapted from my new book, The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era. It reveals some of my reporting on the Republican plot to obstruct President Obama before he even took office, including secret meetings led by House GOP Whip Eric Cantor (in December 2008) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (in early January 2009) where they laid out their daring (though cynical and political) no-honeymoon strategy of all-out resistance to a popular president-elect during an economic emergency. “If he was for it,” former Ohio senator George Voinovich explained, “we had to be against it.” The excerpt includes a special bonus nugget of Mitt Romney dissing the Tea Party.
But as we say in the sales world: There’s more! I’m going to be blogging some of the news and larger themes from the book here at time.com, and I’ll kick it off with more scenes from the early days of the Rep
... Read more »
Summer is on its way out. The class of 2016 is shipping out, all the good summer movies seem a distant memory, and the NFL is only in preseason. At this point, you might even be gearing up to live-tweet and intensely hate-watch media coverage of the 2012 Republican and Democratic national conventions.
While you're waiting, here's a rundown of some numbers to know for the nominating conventions in Tampa and Charlotte:
50,000: The number of people (media, delegates, attendees, merchants, etc.) expected to take part in the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, between August 27 and 30. (Around thirty-two percent of attendees will be journalists; 4.6 percent will be actual delegates.)
Are computer hackers, political activists and an underground army of anarchists preparing to overthrow next week’s Republican National Convention in Tampa? Police in Florida seem to think so, and are taking every precaution to prepare for violence.
Acting on the assumption that hacktivists with the loose-knit, international Anonymous collective will wage a war next week on Tampa with the help of weapon yielding anarchists angry at the Republican Party and American establishment all together, law enforcement agencies in Florida are in a hurry to secure the Sunshine State in the event that a mass orchestrated action disrupts the GOP’s national convention.
Mitt Romney's $250 million fortune is largely a black hole: Aside from the meager and vague disclosures he has filed under federal and Massachusetts laws, and the two years of partial tax returns (one filed and another provisional) he has released, there is almost no data on precisely what his vast holdings consist of, or what vehicles he has used to escape taxes on his income. Gawker has obtained a massive cache of confidential financial documents that shed a great deal of light on those finances, and on the tax-dodging tricks available to the hyper-rich that he has used to keep his effective tax rate at roughly 13% over the last decade.
The uninvited participation of a hurricane at next week’s Republican convention would be superfluous. Buffeted by powerful internal winds, the party may be flooded with cash, but it’s already kind of a debris-strewn mess.
Who would have imagined that Topic A, in the days before GOP delegates gather in Tampa, would be abortion? Certainly the thought never crossed the minds of the convention planners who intended this four-day infomercial to be a nonstop indictment of President Obama’s performance on the economy. But the old line about the relationship between the political parties and their candidates — “Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line” — is so last century.
I meet you all the time. You hate Obama. You hate gay people. You hate black people, immigrants, Muslims, labor unions, women who want the right to make choices concerning their bodies, you hate em all. You hate being called racist. You hate being called a bigot. Maybe if you talked about creating jobs more than you talk about why you hate gay people we wouldn't call you bigots. Maybe if you talked about black people without automatically assuming they are on food stamps while demanding their birth certificates we wouldn't call you racist. You hate socialism and social justice. You hate regulations and taxes and spending and the Government. You hate.
Main 
