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Ford plans to reduce the weight of its F-150 pickup truck by about 700 pounds, a 15% reduction in weight, by switching parts of the body from steel to aluminium. The new F-150 pickup truck is designed to be introduced in 2014 and capable of meeting new fuel efficiency standards through 2020. This would enable a 25% increase in fuel efficiency and help meet the Obama administration fuel efficiency standards of 2011, which require the U.S. vehicle fleet to average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.

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Paul Tough's detailed and vivid account of the problems in Chicago's South Side in 1987 when Obama worked there as acommunity activist, in 2007 when Obama visited the area and expressed his vision about what was needed for the Roseland section, and in 2012 when Tough visits Roseland to document life today in this part of Chicago. He sees the same problems and a need for an all round approach to help kids of parents without work living below the poverty line to provide not just financial help but the kind of support and institutional help that would help them overcome the disabling effects of growing up in broken homes and counteract the destructive effects of a poor environment surrounding them. He left Roseland with a feeling that the President has not pushed hard to accomplish much of what he started out to do and let opportunities slip by.

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The logjam continues between the French and German banks- represented by the Institute of International Finance and its negotiator Charles Dallara- and the governments of Germany and Greece, supported by the IMF. The position of the Greek government is that the interest rate on new bonds stretching out over a long time period that woud be exchanged at 50% face value of existing bonds should be set at rates well below 4%, because Greece faces a growing deficit and rapidly worsening economy. The German government which is faced with the prospect of providing additional funds to Greece supports this. The IIF position is for an interest rate of between 4-5%.

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Larsen says the EFSF should get the funding it needs to recapitalize troubled European banks, as the first step to solving the eurozone financial crisis. Banks in Spain and Italy that failed stress tests would get funds to build up their capital. Creditor haircuts should be part of the effort to reduce the debt burden of troubled eurozone countries.

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PC shipments worldwide declined by 14% in the first quarter of 2013, compared to the prior year quarter, according to IDC. Gartner Research's estimate for the first quarter PC shipments shows a decline of 11.2%. IDC analysts say the introduction of Windows 8 with touch screen capabilities has not reversed this trend. It may have exacerbated the trend because Windows 8 made changes that reduced the PC experience to bring in touch screen and other features available on tablets, and made the product more confusing to use. This view of IDC is confirmed by some companies which say the incremental value of Windows 8 is not worth the cost of training employees to use the new PC's with Windows 8.

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President Obama's program for education includes promoting charter schools, closing failed schools, making teacher pay reflect the quality of education they can provide, and providing financing to support better education and better classrooms. Here he outlined his plans in a major speech on education to an Hispanic group.

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Once again the unemployment statistics lie- women's unemployment at 5.7% in 2014 does not reflect the real story. The number of women employed in 2014 is 55.2%, worse than in Oct. 2010. Many women looking for work give up and drop out of the work force, these women have not vanished, they are simply not being counted in the frequently quoted unemployment statistic. This spells bad news for Democrats in the midterm 2014 elections- today the households making less than 30,000 are almost evenly split on whether they vote Republican or Democratic 43% to 46%, according to polls by Pew Research Center, compared to the 2012 presidential election figures of 35% to 63%. Interestingly the reverse is true for voters with incomes over $100,000 where voters are about evenly split for Republican or Democratic choices for Congress. In 2012 presidential elections the Republicans had a 10 percentage point lead for this income group. Democratic advisors Carville and Greenberg advise not even mentioning the word "recovery" for the U.S. midterm 2014 Congressional elections. About 6.7 million people had multiple jobs in 2010, the figure now is 7 million. About 2.62 million people say they had part time jobs because they could not find full time work in April 2014 up from 2.57 million in Oct. 2010. A separate piece in the WSJ May 20, 2014, shows 10 million U.S. households under water on mortgages and another 10 million households having less than 20% equity in their homes in 2014....

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10.5 million vehicles is the new number at GM for USA auto sales in 2009. GM has consistently predicted a scenario for auto sales that is much higher than it has turned out to be, leading to a lack of proactive speedy decisionmaking where needed to close plants, get financing and other steps needed to pull the company out of trouble. This new lower number may also turn out to be higher than actual because figures for inventories, unemployment, foreclosures, consumer spending, exports, all are worsening.

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The Census Bureau reports that 46.2 million Americans were living in poverty in 2010. This is an increase of 2.6 million over 2009. This is the highest number of Americans living in poverty since 1958, when this statistic was first measured. Poverty is defined for 2010 as income at or below $22,314 for family of four. Also relevant is the median household income which went down to $49,445 in 2010, a decline of 2.3% from 2009. The typical household earned less in 2010 than in 1997, in inflation adjusted terms. The Census Bureau reports 16.3% of Americans had no health insurance coverage in 2010, the same as 2009.

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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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This Reagon Memo from 1980 was written by his advisors George Shultz, Milton Friedman, Paul McCracken and others before his first inauguration in 1980. It provides the new president with prudent advice on policy and methods to deal with soaring inflation and a stagnant economy. Its relevance today lies in the emphasis on charting out a long term plan for growth by encouraging private investment in the economy and providing a sure framework for the private sector to generate expansion.

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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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Efforts in 2014 by Jizhong Energy Company to reduce pollution in the city of Xingtai, population 7.6 million, by closing down the worst polluting plants and installing new equipment. The World Bank put the cost of pollution, including cancer and other health problems, at 9% of gross national income in 2009. The Ministry of Environmental Protection estimates 3.5% of GDP as the cost of pollution in 2010. Xingtai's pollution levels have been recorded by air quality monitors at as high as 30 times China's national standard. Government figures show the PM2.5 in the city's air is 150 micrograms per cubic meter over the last 12 months, more than 4 times the national standard. To get some idea what this means, consider that Fresno, California, with the highest pollution level in the U.S. had PM2.5 level of 18 micrograms per cubic meter. To show it is serious the central government requires the city to post pollution figures online, down to individual smokestacks and exhaust ports.

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John Lewis, is the last surviving speaker of the March on Washington in 1963, when Martin Luther King gave his historic speech. Here he describes how Martin Luther King would see today's America. Foremost he points out is that MLK would want to see justice not just as racial justice, but justice in a broader sense that says something about the dignity and value of human beings. And this means, says Lewis, the president getting away from advisers and polls, and talking to ordinary people. It means focussing on jobs, the unemployed and people facing foreclosure, and seniors struggling on limited incomes. He calls for a "freedom budget" that would pool resources for infrastructure and investments that would create a better environment for people to live in.

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Krugman points out that the U.S. Federal Reserve's forecasts in March 2012 show the U.S. will experience low inflation and high unemployment for many years. These forecasts are in sharp contrast to the expectations in the equity markets based on an uptick for a couple of months of unemployment numbers. The Fed's own statements suggest the improvement in hiring may be temporary and a response to the overreaction in hiring in 2009-2010 to the financial crisis, and not a lasting improvement. The Fed pointed out that the long term unemployed are at about 40% of the total unemployed and the share of the population that is working in March 2012 has barely budged from 58% in 2009.