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A bipartisan compromise in the U.S. Senate provides for a 30 day review of the Iran nuclear deal by Congress. The White House accepted this after enough Democrats favored the idea for the 67 votes to override a presidential veto.

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Macron received 27% of the vote to 24% for Le Pen and 21.7% for Melenchon. Pecresse of the Republicans 4.7% and Zemmour on the far right at 7%.  If no candidate wins 50% of the vote there is a runoff on April 24  of the voters who voted for other smaller parties and how voters for former socialist candidate Melenchon respond in the runoff. French departments in the Caribbean, Atlantic and Pacific can vote. There are also 1.4 million overseas voters. Which all adds to an interesting mix that these Guardian color coded graphics provide an insight into to show voter sentiment in 2022. Le Pen continues to draw support from the northeast, southeast around Marseille, and rural regions in east and south with Zemmour drawing away some far right voters in the Marseille region. Some of these areas suffered as manufacturing shifted to China, as in the industrial midwest of the US. Some of this is also communities involved in the Yellow Vest protests about cost of living for working class voters. Macron draws support from the western and south west regions around the cities of Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon, and affluent areas of Paris that have gained during the Tech and advanced industrial revolution. This also includes rural areas. Melenchon as former socialist candidate draws support from less affluent suburbs of Paris and all parts of the country looking for a shift from power concentrated in the presidency. About 13.2% of the vote is for smaller parties,  showing the kind of fragmentation that happened also in Germany as the main parties the Socialists and the Republicans lost significant numbers of voters. Valerie Pecresse of Sarkozy's Republicans received only 4.7%, showing severe losses for the main parties. ...

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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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A Tax Policy Center study (joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Insitute) shows $157 billion would be generated in the first year from an increase in taxes on the top 1% of income earners in the U.S., about 1.13 million households earning average $2.1 million, by increasing the federal tax rate from current 33.4% for this group to 40%. This could pay for a program to provide tution free education in America's colleges and universities. Even increasing the federal tax to 40% on the 115,000 households earning over $9.4 million on average, the top 0.1% of American households, would generate $55 billion in the first year, enough to pay for the $47 billion cost of tution free education at all of America's public colleges and universities, according to the Tax Policy Center. Economists including Stiglitz and others, point to significant impact of revenue generated from such a tax when applied to improving educational opportunity for the middle class and lower income groups. Education is a great leveler of income disparities as seen in the U.S. after World War II. During recent decades the highest income groups weren major beneficiaries of tax and economic policy, at the very time the middle class and factory workers were hit hard by global competition which lowered wages and exported jobs. The interest rate policies of the Fed after boom bust cycles also favored large investors in equity markets over smaller income earners with savings account deposits, whose savings experienced little growth under interest rates close to zero. ...

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How will countries like India generate jobs when technology enables manufacturing and other activity to do work with fewer and fewer people. Even Hon Hai in China is shifting work to robots. Technological progress is leaving more people unemployed and widening income gaps with the benefits going to a few people, says the Economist in this research based essay. It will require carefully managed governance to invest in infrastructure, raise skills of less skilled workers through education, and wage subsidies for those left behind to ensure our current system works in the future.

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A major change is taking place. Automakers around the world are shifting to smaller engines. Hyundai's Sonata for 2011 and the Tucson crossover for 2010 are going to have only 4 cylinder engines. Many V-6's offered by Detroit carmakers are being replaced with 4 cylinder engines and V-8 with V-6 engines. Ford is using the EcoBoost a turbocharged V-6 to offer new options for its Taurus, Lincoln MKT and other cars.

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The racial polarization in the U.S. before the presidential elections of 2012 between Romney and Obama. During the 2008 elections Obama did as well as Clinton by getting 43% of the white vote, it now appears headed into the 30's. This situation is reminiscent of the one facing Mondale in the 1980 election with Reagan, when Mondale received only 35% of the white vote. Fully 91% of the support for Romney comes from white voters as he passes 50% among overall voters in a late Oct. 2012 ABC/Washington Post poll. One irony in this situation is that Obama contested the 2008 election as a person who could bridge the racial divide.

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A report from the U.S. Federal Reserve on the impact of the financial crisis of 2008-2009 on the wealth of American households. Between 2007 and 2010 says the report the median net worth of American families went down by 39%, from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010. This had the result of putting Americans back to the level of net worth in 1992. Much of the loss in net worth was from asset value reductions. The median value of stock market based retirement accounts decreased by 7% to $44,000. The biggest drop was in housing values- falling by 42% to $55,000 in the three years. Americans are working down their debt- a quarter of families are debt free, credit card balances declined 16% to $2600 from $3100 from the period 2007 to 2010 of the report. Yet the median level of family debt remains the same as more families support their kids education by taking out college loans. Median income fell about 8% to $45,800 in 2010, with income losses especially large in the manufacturing industries as the U.S. manufacturing sector worked to improve competitiveness. Other factors supplement this picture. The burden of college loans increased to over $1 trillion for middle and working class families. With the burden of college debt young people were more likely to delay buying first homes, indefinitely dealying recovery in the housing market. Seniors on retirement see interest income from savings negligible with low interest rates and higher risk in a volatile stock market. ...

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Foreign investment in the auto industry is having a significant impact in the growth of Mexico's middle class. VW has plants in Puebla, General Motors in Silao, Chrysler in Toluca, Nissan in Aguascalientes. Production increased by 24% in February 2012 over the prior year. The growth is likely to continue. Facilities in Mexico have high productivity and are technologically equiped comparable to plants in the U.S., Europe and Japan. Nissan plans a $2 billion investment in a plant in Aguascalientes. Because of the lower cost of living, with food, transportation and health care costing less, even though household appliances cost more, workers at a Mexican plant earning $4 an hour in pay and benefits or $130 a week can still have a decent standard of living. Foreign investment is likely to grow with Mexico's emphasis on technical education - about 130,000 engineers graduating each year according to Mexico's president Calderon- the work ethic of young Mexicans joining manufacturing plants, the productivity of these lower cost plants, and a growing market in Latin America. Nissan plans to produce 1 million cars in Mexico with an investment of $2 billion in Aguascalientes. Nissan has succeeded in taking over from VW as the preeminent manufacturer in Mexico, and has 32,000 workers in the Aguascalientes area, once a small town but now a thriving city of 700,000. Drug cartels have no interest in places like Aguasalientes, which is why foreign investment continues to come into Mexico. The lack of economical credit- interest rate on car loans is about 10%- and the flow of about 600,000 used cars each year into Mexico from the U.S. has restricted growth in Mexico's automobile market. Jose Munoz, Nissan's senior executive for Latin America sees this changing as more credit including Nissan's new financing center in Aguascalientes make lower cost credit easily available to a growing middle class....

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Checking the facts, Obama's claim of Romney's $5 trillion in tax cuts and Romney's claim of Obama taking $716 billion out of Medicare.

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Financial Stability FOrum will be renamed the Financial Stability Board and include 10 additional members, These additional members are from developing countries or emerging markets, including Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, and China. This forum which currently brings together regulators, central bankers and finance ministers from a few wealthy nations, will now reflect the views of emerging countries. It previously only served as aforum for exchanging ideas. Now it will be given the task of drafting the detailsfor global standards for financial institutions, including benchmarks for executive pay and how much risk that financial firms can take on. But there is still some resistance to the idea of getting ideas from different sources and including the benefit of a diversity of experiences and backgrounds, even though some of these countries, have borne the brunt of these recurring economic crises in the past, as have Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. Howard Davies, director of the London School of Economics says that you have to hear out China but objects to taking advice from Argentina, a comment which reveals the insular nature of these forums and boards in the past, with little or no representation from places where a majority of the word's peoples live. As would be expected in the light of that comment, there is resistance to giving China, India, Brazil, Russia, and other large developing countries like Mexico, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia proper representation in the IMF's governing bodies, and having the rules changed so that the head of the IMF and other important staff members could be selected from emerging countries. Each of these countries can bring adifferent perspective to the decisions made at the IMF, as most of them have suffered from these recurring economic crises in the postwar period. South Korea's experience with the IMF is the most recent and is covered in the link to S. Korea and the IMF, and if reflected in the policy making at IMF could help it perform a more constructive role in this crisis. This is also the case with some of the other countries....

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How the IMF conditionality has changed in the 2009 global economic crisis. The IMF head, Dominique Strauss-Kahn of France, is aware how sensitive nations around the world have become to the word IMF. So much so that it has even suggested removing the word IMF from loans to get takers. The IMF conditons worsened the S. Korean financial crisis in 1998. See link to this. This time Kahn has advocated that the developed countries of Europe and the USA increase stimulus spending to 2% of GDP.And there are fewer calls for cutting spending in developing countries offered help by the IMF. Pakistan was asked to increase interest rates by 3% but actually increased them by 2% to fight inflation. But to get some idea how the IMF is viewed with suspicion and hostility in many countries one has to listen to comments made. The move for Pakistan was so unpopular in 2008 that Mohsin Khan a top IMF official says he met with agroup of generals to get their backing. Some IMF officials insistend on a 10% rate increase. Something like that would have led to riots in Pakistani cities. IMF loaned Pakistan $7.6 billion. When S. Korea said no to the IMF credit line, Lee Hyoung-ryoul, a Korean Finance Ministry official said that S. Koreans tremble and financial markets turn sensitive whenever they hear the word "IMF." This time Brazil, S. Korea and Mexico, were offered condition free credit lines. But it has found no takers from these three conuntries, so badly is the IMF viewed in developing countries. Even though it appears that Kahn, in the small club of western nation's officials and staff that form the governing body of the IMF, is trying to give the IMF a new image, its just so bad and the views of the old timers at the IMF on spending or interest rates so contrary to the needs of people in the developed and developing countries, that a new generation of people in finance and economics will be needed before real change is established. ...

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Two thirds of Americans are becoming pessimistic about the economy. This is one of the results of a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll. This is up from 53% in January. Voters are losing confidence in the idea that the Democrats can come up with better solutions than the Republicans. Only 24% of those polled have positive feelings for the Republican party, with Democrats doing only slightly better. Democratic pollster, Peter Hart- who along with Republican pollster Bill McInturff conducted the survey- calls it the JetBlue election. This description is from the JetBlue flight attendent who ran from the plane after exiting through an emergency chute. There is a sense of severe discomfort and looking for the exit, he says. With 6 in 10 of those polled expressing a loss of confidence in the policies of the Obama administration to improve the economy, including 83% of independents, and a quarter of Democrats. The situation has deteriorated on the confidence level with the war in Afghanistan as well. 68% of those polled say they are less confident now that the war in Afghanistan can be brought to a successful conclusion....