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A Republican says the party's failures to come up with alternative policies instead of simply opposing president Obama, has led to the atmosphere of negativism and anti-immigrant rhetoric that increases support for Trump in the party base. He cites as an example 2012 Republican presidential nominee Romney and his comments about "self-deportation." Other examples cited include pushing Rubio to where he repudiated his own immigration legislation just to maintain support in the party. He says this leaves him little option but to vote for Hillary Clinton.

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The view from Asian officials and scholars that it was not the savings glut that originated in Asia that caused the economic crisis in the U.S. The idea of a"savings glut" that caused low rates for along time and set up conditions for a housing bubble was presented by Ben Bernanke in 2005 before he was governor of the Fed. It was considered acontributing factor in the crisis. Mr Panitchpakdi, head of the UN Confreence on Trade and Development says that Asians did not borrow heavily for consumption and Americans did. Consumption levels he says are normal in Asia and average 40% of GDP. Household consumption in China is 36% but thats because growth in investment and exports has been very strong, npot because consumption has been weak. Speaking at the same conference Chinese central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan sais Chinese consumption needs to rise and saving rate fall but micro factors like regulation played an overwhelming part. Zhou says the increase in the savings rate in recent years comes not from households but from corporate savings as retained profits. Lawrence Lau, another economist, says China's trade surplus was at 2% for many years till 2005 when it jumped to 5% of GDP. ...

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Rick Perry faces criticism from Republican candidates Romney, Bachmann, Huntsman and Paul at the Republican presidential candidate debate in Tampa on September 12, 2011. Perry defended his remarks on Social Security by telling viewers- "slam dunk guaranteed that program is going to be in place." Romney suggested Perry had been served four aces for his jobs record in Texas. And Santorum accused Perry of providing education assistance to illegal immigrants to attract the Latino vote. Perry defended his remarks on Fed chairman Bernanke printing money amounting to treasonous behaviour.

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Harvard professor Robert Lawrence tells Tom Keene, the Obama administration has'nt paid that much attention to trade and trade agreements. He says this is unfortunate because it is important to lower barriers to trade, create fair trade, and increase U.S. exports.

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Eric Holder Jr, the Attorney General of USA, told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commisssion that the F.B.I. was investigating more than 2800 mortgage fraud cases. Of these 2800 cases, 1842 are classified as major cases, involving losses of more than $1 million. In addition federal charges are pending against 826 defendents. Lanny Breuer, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department's criminal division stated that the fraud cases included loan origination schemes, property flipping, foreclosure rescue schemes and loan modifications. Those accused of wrongdoing include real estate brokers, appraisers and bank insiders and "plain old fraudsters who gravitated to mortgage fraud." Sheila Bair in her opening remarks to the Financial Inquiry Commission, led by California state Treasurer Angelides, stated that it was necessary to find a way to breakup large banks without using the option of government support. Bair pointed out that the basic assumptions about financial supervision, credit availability and market discipline that were considered acceptable in the regulatory reform scheme for decades are now appearing seriously flawed. A whole reassessment was needed to change the existing mechanisms and methods. And she emphasized the serious distortions and imbalances in our national policies which moved away from savings to consumption, away from investment in our industrial base and public infrastructure toward housing, and away from real sectors of the economy towards the financial sector. Ms. Schapiro who heads the S.E.C. called for a stable , adequate funding to support the commission's work....

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China had a trade deficit of $7.3 billion in February 2011. Experts say February is not a typical month because of the Chinese New Year.

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Davidoff describes the hype in Silicon Valley that leads to soaring valuations- hype about Nest includes founder Fadell's reference to his vision for home thermostats that would change the world. All the participants benefit says Davidoff, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, venture capital firms and firms acquired such as Nest. Nest was acquired by Google for $3.1 billion, when it would have been valued at about $2 billion before Google showed interest. The hype lets Google present itself as the company of the future, and boost its image, which means a lot in getting investors to support the huge valuations.

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Confrontation between the Egyptian military and the Muslim Brotherhood after the ouster of president Morsi in July 2013.

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Internet IPO's of unprofitable companies in 2013. Investor interest in these companies.

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A report by two former Census Bureau officials, Gordon Green and John Coder, shows the inflation adjusted median household income in the U.S. declined by 6.7%, to 49,909, between June 2009 and June 2011. From December 2007 to June 2009 household income declined by 3.2%. The forces behind this are the large number of people not working or not looking for work who are outside the labor force, and the hourly pay for workers not keeping up with inflation. Prof Henry Farber at Princeton, says his study shows that people who lost jobs in the recession found work again with an average of 17.5% less income than in their prior jobs. This makes this downturn very different than earlier downturns, and giving credence to the argument "that this time its different." Another statistic from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows why- in the period December 2007 to June 2009 average length of time for a person who lost a job to be unemployed increased from 16.6 weeks to 24.1 weeks, with the same figure up to 40.5 weeks in September 2011. Higher declines for Hispanics and other minorities further increased income inequalities. Coder and Green call the impact a substantial decline in the American standard of living....

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Coy cites Paul Krugman's Willie Coyote scenario for the dollar, where the famous character runs off a cliff, but starts to fall only when he starts to look down. One foreign exchange expert says there is a 40% chance of the dollar falling into a crisis point. Two forces are working in that direction. Near zero rates in the USA is making it a speculative play to borrow dollars cheaply, and then sell them to buy other currencies where stocks and bonds yield higher returns. The other is that experts feel that the US may eventually make its huge debt affordable by devaluing its currency. David Malpass does not see rising import prices and inflation as healthy for the US economy. He says the fall of the dollar in the 1980's gave the Japanese the buying power to strengthen their automakers. Coy also sees the risk of a major failure of a financial institution, as a possibility, if it made a bet that made it vulnerable to a falling dollar. At this point 88% of derivatives credit risk exposure in the USA is residing in 5 banks in the second quarter in 2009....

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This WSJ editorial says the U.S. Federal Reserve needs a chairman who is politically independent, especially since the Fed has not been politically independent since 2008. It calls Ben Bernanke a political sidekick of Timothy Geithner at Treasury since 2008. A Summers Fed would have become too much influenced by the White House, which would not serve the country well, as new policies will be needed to wind down the loose monetary and fiscal policies, says the editorial.

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Alan Meltzer would like to see the Fed reverse its quantitative easing, and lower excess reserves gradually starting now. By this he hopes to see the Fed avoid the mistake of making a big shift from excessive ease to severe contraction further down the road. He also warns agains excessive deficit spending. He says a weak economy is not the time to cut spending or raise taxes, and he is not talking of draconian immediate steps. He would like to see a multiyear program to increase fiscal probity and reduce deficits size and frequency. As it stands now he takes both parties to task for lack of fiscal discipline and honest accounting. About $1 trillion in deficits each year on average for next 10 years is in the works, and is an underestimate because the savings of $200-$300 billion in medicare spending have still to be realized, and states do not have funds for increased Medicaid spending, and payments to doctors have still to go down by 25%. Chinese government purchases of half our debt will postpone the day of reckoning says Meltzer, but far better for us to strike at the problem now, before we blow a hole in the dollar and start a downturn. See the separate report on the shrinking UK economy....

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A new West Coast Model is emerging with ballot measures in the states of Washington, California and Oregon. The model is to make up for decades of faulty income distribution which favored tech communities in west coast states leaving behind people from minority communities and the working class outside tech hubs such as San Francisco, San Jose and Seattle. During this period budgets for education and healthcare, social services and essential infrastructure suffered as budgets were squeezed for local governments. Minimum wage also lagged behind and communities struggled to keep up. Washington votes for a ballot measure that raises the minimum wage to $13.25 statewide and mandate paid sick leave for workers. In California a ballot measure makes permanent an income tax surcharge on millionaires to use these funds for education. In Oregon measure 97 places a gross receipts tax on corporations with annual sales in Oregon over $25 million, raising $3 billion a year for schools, health care and other programs. The California and Washington measures are likely to pass, Oregon uncertain, say experts. And even in Oregon supporters have learned from the experience to put forward new proposals on the ballot. The Washington measure is supported by Nick Hanauer, and Zach Silk, president of Civic Ventures in Seattle, who say it is essential to put more money in workers wages to increase growth and to bring better lives outside the tech hub areas. Most of the tech booms of the last two decades have not touched the areas outside tech hub metropolitan areas. The conservative approach adopted in Louisiana and Kansas of reducing taxes first and then when holes in state budgets developed to cut education, health and other service expenditures has not worked, and it has led to the backlash in the form of the new West Coast Model, which is expected to be brought up in other states in the east and midwest. The tech hub areas have grown with the boom in tech but this has largely ignored the rural areas, communities just outside of the tech cities, and led to uneven and distorted growth shortchanging the working class and the middle class, and hurting investment in education and healthcare across each state. Bill Whalen, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution conservative think tank ,says that its hard to deny that the balanced growth for all communities across the state has lagged far behind as the tech booms boosted growth in the economies of California, Oregon and Washington. An article in the German online site Zeit on Silicon Valley described this vividly showing how this can happen in communities sitting side by side in the San Jose area, with minority Hispanic communities and working class communties seeing very little of the benefits of growth. ...

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Somini Sengupta and Brian Frank provide this award winning quality of coverage in text and pictures of life in California's San Joaquin Valley, hit by wildfires and scorching heat in the middle of the pandemic. Shown are workers in the fields of one of America's largest agricultural regions fighting heat and the pandemic, struggling to survive on a precarious hourly wage in these conditions. During earlier periods from 1970 this was an almost picturebook place particularly in the cool and foggy winters, which stretched for miles with apricot, grape, almond and other fruit and vegetable fields. A dry valley using irrigation of fields with water from the surrounding Sierra Nevada mountains. Most affected are millions of workers of Hispanic origin originally from Mexico, who provide most of the labor for harvesting of crops. California with a good educational system and without the drought that hit the region, without the effects of Silicon Valley splitting the people of the state in opposite directions most on minimum wage with a concentration of wealth around major cities and spiralling property values, was a very different place in the 1960's and 1970's from what it is today. Increasing wealth concentrated in pockets and not spread out as it was in the early post war period after Truman and Eisenhower has impoverished large areas and segments of the population, creating what Dickens called in his day- "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times," depending on who and where you were. ...