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Walmart comes out in favor of requiring employers to provide health insurance to all workers, a central feature of President Obama's effort to provide near universal coverage in the USA. As the country's largest private employer, employing 1.4 million Americans, this change is significant. In a letter to the President, Walmart CEO Mike Duke, joined by Andrew Stern of the Service Employees International Union, and John Podesta of the Center for American Progress, who also signed the letter, say they are for an employer mandate which is fair and broad in its coverage. Walmart had a couple of reasons for doing this. For one Walmart needed to join the negotiations, as the Senate Finance Committee is considering other proposals that are less favorable to Walmart than employer mandate. Already Walmart is covering 52% of its employees, and has improved health benefits in recent years in response to criticism of the company. The industry average is 45%, according to a 2008 Kaiser Foundation study, and some companies do not provide the health benefits that Walmart does, so this helps level the playing field by requiring all large companies to share the burden. Walmart wants to see effective cost controls to keep costs down, and Rahm Emmanuel, the President's chief of staff, assured Walmart that "cost control and employer mandate are heads and tails of the same coin." Under the plans considered by the Senate Finance Committee under Max Baucus, small businesses are exempted from the employer mandate. Republicans have opposed employer mandate. And the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has opposed it saying it would make companies lower wages and cut jobs. Walmart's shift has been gradual. From a company used to providing skimpy benefits, it has evolved as it improved benefits, and two years ago it joined the SEIU union to call for affordable health care for all Americans by 2012. It has Mr Dach as its governmental affairs vice president, and this is significant, as Dach is an advisor to Democratic party politicians....

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Chrysler's second quarter loss of $172 million, follows a first quarter loss of $197 million. Operating profit for the second quarter was $183 million, compared to $143 million in the first quarter. Chrysler's forecast is to breakeven on sales between $40-45 billion. Revenue was up by 8.2% in the second quarter to $10.5 billion. Main problem Chrysler faces is an old product lineup. A slowdown in the economy in the second half of 2010 and in 2011 could hurt Chrysler more than the other automakers. Chrysler has available cash of $7.84 billion and additional $2.3 billion available from U.S. Treasury and Canadian government loan agreements.

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The story of a Russian startup company MeshNetics, that had a research project called Golden Box with a team of software programmers. It succumbed to the global financial crisis as it hit Russia and with it dreams of a new wireless technology that would help utilities keep track of energy conservation and other uses. No new investors could be found and the Russian investors cut the funding. Even western investors could not make the investments. Programmers like Bagrak, 27, from Berkeley, California, who worked at Google on an internship and came back to Russia to build its high tech sector. Luzhetsky, 26, from Obninsk, a city built by the Soviets for nuclear and military scientists, which fell into decay and poverty in the post soviet period, this was his first programming job after being educated in the Soviet Union. Mr Grinkug, 57, from a generation of the Soviet period that considered science a religion, he headed the 12 programmer team working on the Golden Box project. The project three ers in the making was expected to release in early 2010. Suvorov who headed MesNetics, who saw his work as part of the move by President Medvedev who came into power in the spring of 2008 to take Russia away from dependence on oil, with investment of $5 billion in a state corporation for nanotechnology. Anatoly Karachinsky, President of the Russian internet technology company IBS Group, who spun off MeshNetics using the brightest talent from his software development team and financed it with his venture fund Oradell Capital. First the optimism in the face of difficulty in the fall of 2008, as the global crisis began to hit Russia, then in October the message to Suvorov that he had to look for a new investor. Then the cuts, first 10% of jobs gone, nine days late a dozen more fired, then the shutdown phase. One person fired after coffee with Suvurov, as things moved quickly. Alexei Rybakov, director of the division that makes the ZigBit, calls 50 investors aday, makiung every kind of pitch, practical, global, patriotic. Grinkug packs up his things, 40 years of codes fit into a few CD's , a few programmers are retained if things change, but for Grinkug the Golden Project he says, will probably die in his head. Its mind boggling how mistakes and unethical behaviour in the banking systems in the west can wash ashore in emerging countries like Russia, and wash away what little stability to build anew life has been achieved in a few years after the 1998 collapse of the ruble and the Russian economy. Its also a contrast between the dreams, hopes and aspirations and the innocence of ordinary young Russian tech engineers and the swings of reality that surround them, of poverty and collapse in early post soviet Russia, then optimism , and now a new kind of reality trying to salvage what has been achieved, and the difficulties in forging a new future that goes beyond 120 million people collecting around a oil wellhead....

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The head of the Chinese Communist Party's rural policy office, Chen Xiwen, says about 20 million migrant workers or one sixth of a total of about 120 million migrant workers have lost their jobs in the 2008 global financial crisis. About 5-7 million migrants join the workforce each year, and this brings the total to about 25 million migrant workers looking for jobs. This presents a major problem in job losses for China. The government is making every effort to ease the problems of migrants, to retain jobs, talk to migrants to explain the situation, and provide asistance. Ian Johnson and Andrew Batson of the WSJ visit the village of Shuangyao in rural China and talk to migrants there.

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Eric Bellman's intervew with Rajiv Lall, chief executive officer of Infrastructure Development Finance, India's largest infrastructure financing company. Lall says the conditions are right for power development to be the next telecom of India's growth story, with some of the same impact that telecom has had bringing mobile phones to hundreds of millions of people in India. IDFC expects 20% growth in net profit in 2010 and 30% in 2011.

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Hingh unemployment in important states including Florida, Pennsylvania, Colorado (8%). Unemployment has improved in Ohio (7%), Virginia and Iowa (6%).

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Trump says he supports the House Republican tax plan for three brackets 12%, 25% and 33%. In his earlier proposal Trump has supported a top rate of 25%. He made these comments, including support for deducting childcare costs, in a speech at the Economic Club of Detroit. Trump did not repeat a call for repealing Dodd-Frank bank supervision legislation. Clinton was critical of Trump's economic team of business people from hedge funds and the real estate industry, saying this was another example of "trickle down economics,"  for giving  "super big tax breaks to large corporations." Michigan has not voted Republican since 1988, and the auto industry rescue was organized by president Obama, a point heavily advertised in the 2012 presidential campaign. Romney had opposed the rescue effort, and during the 2012 campaign the WSJ reports say  Trump called the bailout of automakers a mistake because of expansion overseas.

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Beppe Severgnini is a columnist for Italy's newspaper Corriere della Serra. Here he describes the rift between generations in Italy that is holding Italy back.

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A Wall Street Journal report -after interviews with former TEPCO engineers and executives- throws more light on the failure of power and cooling at certain reactors in Fukushima Daiichi that led to the nuclear meltdown. The difference not grasped at the time turned out to be the critical difference between the reactors where electricity to cool the reactors worked and where the the electricity failed. Of the 10 nuclear reactors at Fukushima, only the 4 with the earlier Mark 1 design failed. These reactors were the earliest reactors installed by G.E. beginning in the 1970's. The Mark 1 reactors were serviced by an American engineering firm called Ebasco. Ebasco designed the reactor buildings really small so that they would be compact and economical. Because of the small size of the reactor buildings the generators providing the electricity supplies to the Mark 1 reactors could not be installed inside the reactor buildings made of fortified concrete and were installed in buildings outside lacking similiar protection. These outhoused generator buildings could not withstand the tsunami, resulting in the loss of power and cooling for these reactors, and leading eventually to the meltdown. The reactors with the Mark II and later designs were installed along with the generators in the same fortified concrete buildings, and these survived the tsunami without disruption in power supplies and cooling. This critical difference was noted by older TEPCO executives who were intervewed, but nothing was done about this because of the added cost of making the major modifications that would be needed. The regulatory system also failed to catch the problems with the original blueprints and design for housing the reactors and generators for cooling reactors. In 2001 the original 30 year operating permit for the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor was renewed, and again in 2011 for another ten year period. Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency is part of the industry ministry, and not kept separate and independent from the nuclear industry, a structural flaw. The ministry considered its job to be promoting nuclear power, and increasing nuclear power from 30% in 2010 to 50% of Japan's electricity output. One inspection official says fundamental design and construction of the reactors from a 30-40 year old design were never looked at in safety reviews by regulators approving the extensions. He even goes to the point of saying that the reviews focussed on things like pipes and fittings, missing entirely the safety of the outhouse buildings housing the generators. One of the top TEPCO engineers says this difference stood out like a sore thumb when did a walk through during inspections. He failed to get the support from fellow engineers and Tepco executives for changes that would add to the cost....

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A terrorist attack in Istanbul, Turkey, in Jan. 2015. Most of the people killed and injured are German tourists. The attack targets Turkey's tourism industry.

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This editorial from the Times after the New Hampshire Republican primary- in which rival candidates attacked Bain Capital- says that leveraged buyouts by private equity firms like Bain Capital were only one of the causes of the growing income inequality, and by no means the principal cause. And they had little to do with the subprime mortgage crisis that led to the financial crisis and recession in 2008, which aggravated the income inequality. A serious factor was the lowering of wages in manufacturing in competition with lower wage countries in a globalized economy and the decline of good manufacturing jobs over three decades. The increase in low wage jobs in the retail and service sector with the decline in manufacturing did little to arrest the growing gap in wages.

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The New York Times reminds readers that Newt Gingrich- who criticized Romney's record at Bain Capital- was himself on the advisory board of private equity firm Forstmann Little. This editorial describes Santorum, Romney and Gingrich as corporate candidates who had close ties to private equity or lobbying firms.

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The U.S. has 22 states that offer some form of work sharing programs to reduce layoffs by having workers work for shorter hours and receive partial unemployment insurance. This is a variation of the "kurzarbeit" programs that have helped Germany reduce layoffs during 2009 and during the period of high unemployment in Germany following the reunification of the country. Worksharing has major benefits in high tech and manufacturing industries where it is difficult to replace employees when the downturn is over and demand picks up. For the economy as a whole it reduces the stress of higher unemployment from cyclical swings in the economy.