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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (108364)	1/28/2012 11:54:01 AM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

When Bain Capital sought to raise money in 1989 for a fast-growing office-supply company named Staples, Mitt Romney, Bain’s founder, called upon a trusted business partner: Goldman Sachs, whose bankers led the company’s initial public offering. When Mr. Romney became governor of Massachusetts, his blind trust gave Goldman much of his wealth to manage, a fortune now estimated to be as much as $250 million. And as Mr. Romney mounts his second bid for the presidency, Goldman is coming through again: Its employees have contributed at least $367,000 to his campaign, making the firm Mr. Romney’s largest single source of campaign money through the end of September. No other company is so closely intertwined with Mr. Romney’s public and private lives except Bain itself. And in recent days, Mr. Romney’s ties to Goldman Sachs have lashed another lightning rod to a campaign already fending off withering attacks on his career as a buyout specialist, thrusting the privileges of the Wall Street elite to the forefront of the Republican nominating battle.

To: RetiredNow who wrote (108364)	1/28/2012 1:19:55 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

Vote of no confidence has crushed Britain's economic recovery Fourth-quarter GDP figures will show that Britain is in a Japanese-style depression lasting well beyond the usual cycle of a recession Here's a chart showing Britain's gross domestic product performance in the Great Depression and three recessions prior to the current one. In case you're afflicted by a bit of colorblindness, as I am, that line which flattens out at minus 4 percent on the far right of the chart is where the U.K. is now: [The above chart clearly shows how ineffective an austerity response to recession is.] More from the UK: Much of the UK's plan for recovery from the financial crisis was based on a full-throttle recovery in 2012. This was going to be the year that a return of consumer confidence, business investment and general spending would converge to send the economy on a trajectory of above-average growth. Maybe we would even get back some of the output we lost in the crash. [...] Business investment has already slumped and confidence indexes show few consumers are ready to spend outside key periods such as Christmas. [...] And the lack of investment will perplex ministers. They have done what the right-wing economists told them to do and moved out of the way — the theory being that public sector spending and investment was "crowding out" the private sector. guardian.co.uk