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Did U.S. Treaury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, ignore a key request by President Obama to present plans for the restructuring of Citigroup after the government bailout of Citigroup? Ron Suskind says this is what happened in his book on the Obama administration and how the White House operated to make key decisions. Ron Suskind, intervewed key members of the Obama White House economic policy team, Lawrence Summers, Christina Romer, Peter Orszag. In all Suskind conducted 700 hours of interviews for his new book in Sept 2011: "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington and the Education of a President." According to the book, in early 2009 after Obama authorized a series of stress tests for banks he told Geithner to develop a plan for restructuring Citigroup. A month later at a meeting not attended by Geithner Obama raised a question about the status of the plan. He was told by Romer that no restructuring plan had been developed for Citi. Suskind says Geithner disagreed about a plan to restructure Citi and decided to ignore the request. Geithner and the Treasury Department say Obama asked Geithner to develop a backup plan to overhaul banks if the government was forced to keep a big ownership stake in the companies, and "there was fortunately never a need to put them in place." Geithner told Suskind that he doesn't slow-walk the President on any matter. Other aspects of the operation of the economic policy team that Suskind covers are a series of memos from top aide Pete Rouse raising questions that ongoing communication between some members of the economic team and Summers was giving Summers power to shape policy. Summers, Director of the National Economic Council, is shown as trying to keep out the views of Romer and budget director Orszag from reaching the President without going through him. When Orszag gives a private report to the president on the deficit, Summers objects saying that this was immoral. Obama lacked the fresh ideas needed to tackle the problems created by the mortgage and banking crisis of 2008, when he used the Clinton administration economic policy team of the 1990's- Rubin, Bernanke, Summers and Geithner. Fresh approaches were needed two decades after Clinton's election in 1992, and the Bush administration that followed, as many of the problems developed during this period. The similiar embedded thinking was shared during the Clinton and Bush administrations and the economic advisors about dealings with the banking sector, but the situation for deficits, unemployment, housing, and the economy had completely changed requiring fresh approaches. ...

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Lower amounts for financial aid available offset the lower rise in tution costs to leave students just as worse off as before with large amount of student debt in 2013-2014.

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Manufacturing in the US is adding jobs for the first time since 1997, according to government data. Job growth in 2010 was 1.2%, or 136,000 jobs. IHS Global Insight expects total manufacturing jobs in the US to increase in 2011 to 12 million. Manufacturing will be a modest contributor to job growth according to economists. Economists projections show a gain of 2.5% or 330,000 manufacturing jobs in 2011. Moody's Analytics estimates job growth of 2% a year through 2015. Government incentives, need to replace aging equipment and rehiring in the automobile industry will help manufacturing. At the same time manufacturers are cautious about hiring and increases in automation reduce the need for workers compared to earlier periods. Overall the loss of about 6 million manufacturing jobs since 1997 will not be made up. Yet the improvement is a positive sign as the US faces high unemployment and companies make investment in new factories overseas to meet growth in emerging markets.

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About 680,000 homeowners applied for the Home Affordability Modification Program, or HAMP, and had their loans modified so that their mortgage payments are reduced. This is only one in four of the 2.7 millon homeowners who tried to to join the program. This according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data released by the Treasury Department. In 2009 the Obama administration launched the program to reverse the rising home foreclosures in the U.S., by reducing the monthly mortgage payments through lower interest rates and extending the term of loans. About $75 billion was estimated as the cost of the program at the time. Only $1 billion of this has been spent by the Obama administration. The program offered payments to 100 mortgage servicers as inducement to complete loan modifications. About half the applicants or 1.3 million were declared ineligible from the beginning, and the program used stricter qualification criteria than loan modification programs offered by individual banks. Applicants were rejected because the necessary paperwork was not submitted or it was lost by the mortgage company- 266,000 falling in this category. An additional 770,000 homeowners who started the program were later disqualified mostly for the paperwork and eligibility problems, with only a small number rejected for failing to make trial payments. Mortgages less than 31% of pretax income were considered affordable and considered ineligible-255,000 were in this category. Over 80% of homeowners in the southern states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee, received no loan modification....

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Paul Volcker before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee on May 9, 2012, before the announcement of the $2 billion trading losses by J.P. Morgan Chase. The following day Chase announced the losses from trades made by JP Morgan trader Bruno Iksil- nicknamed the "London Whale"- who made a complex hedge on a group of corporate bonds, betting $100 billion that the bonds would not default. The Volcker rule as it is currently written would not prevent such a transaction. The problem as Volcker pointed out before the Banking Committee is that under "too big to fail," "the losses would be socialized with the potential gains all private."

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Italy's prime minister, Monti, says he will submit his "irrevocable" resignation, after about 1 year in office, following the withdrawal of support from Berlusconi's People of Liberty party. He told president Giorgio Napolitano he would make an effort to pass the budget and a financial stability law to defer "the consequences of a government crisis" before turning in his resignation.

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Prof. Peterson of Harvard and Hanushek of the Hoover Institution, authors with Woessmann of the book "Endangering Prosperity: A Global View of the American School," offer some startling reminders about the importance of education to economic growth and incomes in countries. Simply by raising the math standards in the U.S. to the higher standards in Canada would raise GDP by three fourths of one percentage point. One advantage that the U.S. enjoys comes from its good university systems, open markets, rule of law, tax rates, and open immigration policies, which give it about two thirds of a percentage point in higher GDP growth per year. The estimates are from the authors calculations. For the period 1960-2009, a period of rapid growth in Asian countries Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, higher test scores in math and reading compared to the wrold average as measured by NAEP test and PISA, have led to 2% higher GDP growth. NAEP shows only 32% of U.S. high school students proficient in math compared to 45% in Germany and 49% in Canada and 63% in Singapore. By contrast to Korea and Taiwan, Peru, Argentina, the Philippines and S. Africa have about 2% less in GDP growth because of lower scores compared to the world average....

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Professors Cole and Ohanian of the University of Pennsylvania and UCLA, provide a new interpretation of FDR's economic policies during the period 1932-1934 and the period 1937-1941, based on their research. This suggests conclusions different from that of Obama advisor, Christina Romer, and Fed chairman, Bernanke about that period. Changes in economic policies under the Roosevelt administration that helped bring wages in line with productivity, reduced strikes, and gradual elimination of the undistributed profits tax, improved incentives for business investment during 1938-1939. Cole and Ohanian, say that by 1941, before the U.S. entered the war, close to half of the increase in nonmilitary hours worked in the U.S. between 1939 and the peak of the war, had already been achieved. And this was primarily the result of the changes in FDR's policies in 1938. They say a similiar opportunity is presented by the proposals of the Bowles-Simpson commission on deficit reduction, by lowering the corporate income tax through simplification of the tax code and reducing or eliminating most tax expenditures. Improving the incentives for business to hire and invest through this and other steps is likely to do more for the economy than the steps tried so far since 2009....

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The unemployment rate in the U.S. state of Ohio drops to 7.2% in June 2012 from 10.6% in the second half of 2009. But polls show two thirds of the respondents see the economy as being worse or the same as in 2011. Because of lower wages in some industries such as auto manufacturing which are reviving there appears to be a lowering of incomes and expectations.

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Tyler Cowan says slower growth in India is a troubling sign in 2012, and as significant if not more than the eurozone crisis. A less mentioned and major problem is the low productivity in agriculture, and he points to Japan, Taiwan, and S. Korea where major increases in agricultural productivity preceded successful industrialization. With growing population and continued growth India will be one of the largest economies in the world. The other major problem is shortages of energy supplies and the inability of state owned company, Coal India, to upgrade technology and increase output.

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Fomer Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says America needs to take up a vigorous foreign policy in his book "Worthy Fights." Both Panetta and Hillary Clinton, and Gen. Dempsey of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Petraeus of the CIA, supported U.S. taking a strong stand in Syria by supporting Syrian opposition forces in the summer of 2011 and were overruled by president Obama and his election advisers because of the approaching 2012 election. Here Mark Landler provides more insights into Hillary Clinton's deeply held belief shared with Panetta that the U.S. had to take strong action where necessary to deter foes, to get into the ring to use Panetta's expression. The U.S. support for action in Libya to support Britain and France comes from the efforts of Clinton, and any lack of followup one of president Obama's errors in foreign policy. In April 2016 president Obama said that he considered his failure to followup in Libya to help the new Libyan government his biggest mistake in his presidency. Here Mark Landler looks at Hillary Clinton's entire career as showing a conviction and belief on the need for action where necessary in the U.S. global engagement. Compared to the bluster of the candidates Trump, Cruz and Sanders, with little experience to back this up in their careers in real estate, law or the Senate , Landler says Clinton is the last remaining hawk. Here he describes Hillary Clinton's contact and empathy for the troops from her trip to the American base in Tuzla, Bosnia, in March 1996. In fact many have forgotten that Yugoslavia is what it is today after the Milosevic years and the ethnic wars with Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, members of the EU and Serbia negotiating to enter EU, because of the bombing campaign taken by Bill Clinton through NATO in 1999 to prevent ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, and peacemaking following the Bosnian War using diplomat Holbrooke to negotiate the 1995 Dayton Accords. Here Landler describes the meetings with Gen. Keane who pushed for the troop surge that worked in Iraq under president George W. Bush. Clinton supported Keane's proposal made in April 2015, for a no-fly-zone in Syria that would help opposition forces till a settlement could be negotiated. Keane pointed out to Clinton that there was a flaw in Obama's policies- that negotiation would work only if the no-fly-zone was used to support opposition forces. By the end of 2015 Hillary Clinton publicly adopted this position. During a period when Americans are weary of foreign entanglements but understand the need to provide leadership where needed, Hillary Clinton, provides a balance between the pendulum swinging too sharply in one direction in the Bush years and in another direction in the Obama years, says Landler. A view also articulated by Leon Panetta, who was chief of staff for President Clinton during the Bosnian conflict and the Dayton Accords, where the U.S. showed strength of purpose in war and also in negotiating the peace without major entanglements....

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Mortimer Zuckerman, publisher of U.S. News and World Report, looks behind the unemployment numbers and points to U-6 the real measure of under utilized labor and of workers working part time because of a lack of full time work, and says this is at about 15%. Add the eight million who quit looking and it is 19%, says Zuckerman The unemployment rate of 8.1% does not reflect the eight million workers who have quit looking. The long term unemployed, workers unemployed for more than 27 weeks is at 40.7%, or 5.2 million workers. Fewer Americans work today than in 2000, even though the population has increased by 31 million. Only 96,000 jobs were generated in August 2012. Something is seriously wrong and the right steps have not been taken.

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Ashraf Khalil describes the history of relations between the Muslim Brotherhood leadership and the leaders of secular parties with prescient remarks on how this creates problems in Egypt's transition to democratic government. The mistake made by the Muslim Brotherhood leaders, says Khalil, is to insist on a quick move to elections in November 2011, with the Brotherhood hoping to gain advantage in seats with its organization already in place compared to the secular parties which need more time to stage an organized effort. If this results in a lopsided result with the Muslim Brotherhood gaining more seats than its real strength, and the secular parties feeling left out in a revolution to set up democratic government that they led, Egypt's transition to democracy will remain flawed. This is now the stuation as the military which sets the rules and the Muslim Brotherhood have agreed on immediate elections. The Muslim Brotherhood's leaders have spent years being suppressed by the Mubarak regime, and lack the experience needed for such a difficult transition as Egypt faces, even with the best of intentions. Compressing the transition into a short time frame makes it even more difficult. Errors of judgement by Muslim Brotherhood leaders in not developing a consensus, and the uncertain role of the post-Mubarak military and police, compound the difficulties and risks....

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Simon Denyer's interview with Vinod Rai, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India. Rai has persisted in uncovering corruption in India. He was appointed by prime minister Manmohan Singh from India's Finance ministry five years ago, and runs an organization with 63,000 employees with accountants in all Indian states. Reports by his agency have uncovered giving away of natural resources and telecom licenses worth billions of dollars. He describes the amounts involved as huge and attributes the increase in accountability of politicians and ministers to active citizens groups. The Indian media and Supreme Court have supported efforts to increase accountability. The CAG has constitutional protection. Rai sees the CAG's role as examining government spending to uncover irregularities and make it accountable to parliament. India is rare in this respect compared to China, Russia and other emerging market countries because of its vibrant media and democracy. A 2010 report uncovered corruption in giving away mobile phone network licenses and a 2012 report uncovered allocation of coal land without a competitive auction, with loss in government revenues estimated at $30 billion. The reports showed prime minister Singh aware of the irregularities but unable or unwilling to call for transparency and proper process. Rai's six year term expires in May 2013. ...

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Chief Justice Roberts and President Obama both excelled at Harvard Law School, one as managing editor of the Law Review and the other as President of the Law Review. One raised in suburban Indiana, and going to small Catholic boarding school started 5 years earlier by Chicago and Indiana businessmen like his father, a steel company executive. The other fatherless trying to construct his own identity at a school in Hawaii founded in 1841 to educate the children of white missionaries. Roberts adminstered the oath of office to Obama in January 2009.

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The home ownership rate for the U.S. in March 2012, is 65.4%, the same rate as in 1997 before the housing bubble, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The irony of this is that the housing bubble was inflated by politicians in Congress and mortgage lenders and purchasers of mortgage securities. Fannie Mae and Countryside worked together ostensibly to promote home ownership while pursuing profits. In the case of politicians they pursued goals of raising employment and growth without understanding the risks of artificially inflating home ownership, and without consideration for incomes of subprime borrowers. A less benign view of the interests and goals of politicians comes from reflections on the impact of political lobbying by Fannie Mae and other housing lenders in the U.S. Congress. The consequences in terms of foreclosures have been devastating for minorities as well as other middle class homeowners. It has also damaged the U.S. banking system, credit growth in the economy and prospects for recovery, which will take years to correct. The federal government is also saddled with large losses at Fannie Mae because of its quasi government agency role. That role led to inflation of the bubble. Most of the consequences will be borne by middle and lower income households in the U.S. The pass-through effects in a global economy affect Europe, and emerging market countries. ...

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The median net worth of Hispanic and Black families has been severely affected by the recession. Because minorities hold a much larger part of their assets in household equity the foreclosure crisis and the recession have had a devastaing impact on both minority groups. The median net worth of Hispanic families dropped by two thirds and black families by half after the 2008 recession from the 2005 figures, and was around $6000 for 2009 for both groups, according to data from the Pew Research Center. The Pew report shows median net worth of a white family is 20 times that of a black family, and 18 times that of a Hispanic family, with the gap between these minorities and whites twice as large in 2009 compared to the period before the recession in 2005. This was even true for Asian American families, whose median net worth dropped by half from 2005 to 2009, to $78,000. The figure for whites dropped much less from $135,000 to $113,000 during the same period. Another significant finding is that within each group the share of the wealthiest 10% of the people increased between 2005 and 2009, for all households this went up from 49% to 56%, for Hispanics from 56% to 72%, for Blacks from 59% to 67%....

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Bruni on the view that Obama has squandered his advantages of oratorical transcendence, poetry, serious thoughtfulness, in the U.S. presidential election of 2012. He does not mention the lack of a serious plan to turn the economy around, high rate of joblessness and declining incomes that are a basic issue in the 2012 election, and how oratorical transcendence has little correlation with getting the right policies implemented. The Des Moines Register's support in 2008 put Obama on the road to the presidency in 2008 with a victory in the Iowa primary. In 2012 it gave its endorsement to Romney to give him a chance to correct the problems with the economy and to do this with a new effort to forge the bipartisan consensus missing in the Obama first term.

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Feldstein points out that Obama economic plans missed the real target, which was on the home front where it came down to addressing the problems of 15 million homeowners under water- with mortgages exceeding the value of their homes- and lack of solutions to deal with the $1.5 trillion in troubled commercial real estate loans. Administration plans really did not help more than a couple of hundred thousand homeowners to reduce their monthly mortgage payments. Getting banks to start lending again by selling impaired loans to nonbank investors, also failed to work, as banks were reluctant to do so and reduce their accounting capital. Health care legislation simply distracted attention from the real problems. See the links to Feldstein's repeated insistence that the new administration (and even during the late stages of the Bush administration) focus on these problems. Health care legislation that passed simply would not control the increase in health care spending, that the public correctly perceived as the real problem if the other health care issues were to be resolved. Instead Obama's health care legislation offered to increase the deficit to unsustainable levels, with no solutions to more pressing home front problems in sight. Feldstein, is one of the most eminent US economists....

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John Bolton looks at the continual dithering behaviour of the U.S. president in the Middle East- Iran, Libya, Syria, Iraq in sequence- and provides some insights into the president's behaviour. He says it comes from Obama's distrust of the U.S. role in the world as a positive factor, and a deterministic view of the "arc of history" bending towards outcomes he finds ideologically acceptable. This coincides with a different public perception of America's role in the world, not so much of mistrust and skepticism, as of indifference and focus back on domestic issues following the event of the first war in Iraq and of the 2008-2009 financial crisis. The two are different in nature as the public including women may not share the ideological frame of mind of the president that the U.S. is not overall a serious positive factor in the world through the presidencies of TR, Wilson, FDR, Truman, Ike, to Kennedy, Reagan and Clinton, from the Russo-Japanese war, through the First and Second World War, the Berlin Airlift and the Korean War, to the Balkan conflict. Bolton writes at a time when the two perceptions are about to diverge as the U.S. returns to its normal role of positive and constructive engagement with the world....

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The Home Affordable Refinance Program's (HARP) gradual success in 2012-2013 in reducing foreclosures, after struggling in 2010-2011. From about cumulative 1 million who refinanced loans under HARP for relief in home payments the numbers went up to close to 3 million by the end of 2013, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Of this a major proportion were people who owed less than 105% of their home's value. The performance of the program improved with a revamp of HARP at the end of 2011.