Geithner Weak Dollar Seen as U.S. Recovery Route Versus BRICS - Bloomberg

For U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, a weaker dollar may now be in the national interest. The dollar has dropped more than 7 percent since Aug. 27, when Chairman Ben S. Bernanke signaled the Federal Reserve is prepared to ease monetary policy. Where once such a decline may have been met with resistance from the U.S., Geithner may now be tolerating it as a way of bolstering the recovery.
Companies from Costco Wholesale Corp. to Deere & Co. have credited the weaker dollar for giving their earnings a boost, and the currency’s slide has helped propel the Dow Jones Industrial Average above 11,000 for the first time since May. Higher stock prices in turn are bolstering consumer and business confidence. The danger is that the decline gets out of hand, fueling increases in the cost of living over the long term and prompting investors to avoid U.S debt.
“In an era where deflation pressures appear to be the greatest risk, growth is below trend and the U.S. wants to boost exports, why would they not want” a weaker dollar, Jim O’Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management in London, said in an interview. “The answer is when it becomes a problem for financial markets. Until then it’s a straightforward strategy.”

Will Apple’s Culture Hurt the iPhone? NYT

SAN FRANCISCO — If you want a smartphone powered by Google’s Android software, you could get Motorola’s Droid 2 or its cousin, the Droid X. Then there is the Droid Incredible from HTC, the Fascinate from Samsung and the Ally from LG. That’s just on Verizon Wireless. An additional 20 or so phones running Android are available in the United States, and there are about 90 worldwide.
But if your preference is an Apple-powered phone, you can buy — an iPhone.
That very short list explains in part why, for all its success in the phone business, Apple suddenly has a real fight on its hands. Americans now are buying more Android phones than iPhones. If that trend continues, analysts say that in little more than a year, Android will have erased the iPhone’s once enormous lead in the high end of the smartphone market. But this is not the first time Apple has found itself in this kind of fight, where its flagship product is under siege from a loose alliance of rivals selling dozens of competing gadgets.

Wall Street slides as mortgage worries hit banks

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks posted their biggest loss in two months on Tuesday on fears banks might be on the hook for billions of dollars in souring mortgage bonds. The afternoon selloff hit investors already reeling from an unexpected credit tightening by China and disappointing financial results from Apple (NasdaqGS:AAPL - News) and IBM (NYSE:IBM - News).
The biggest scare came on news that Bank of America (NYSE:BAC - News) and possibly others may be forced to take back billions of dollars in mortgages that should not have been bundled into bonds.
"It's reminding investors of what was the main impetus for the horrific selloff we had a few years ago," said Eric Kuby, chief investment officer at North Star Investment Management in Chicago. "If you were recently struck by lightning, you are a little skittish when there is a thunderstorm."

Fed minutes: Easing may be needed "before long"

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal Reserve officials believed in September the struggling recovery might soon need more help, and they discussed several ways to provide support, including the possible adoption of a price-level target.

Policy-makers had a "sense that (more) accommodation may be appropriate before long," the central bank said on Tuesday.

In minutes of the its last policy-setting session held September 21, the Fed said officials discussed several approaches to aiding the economy but focused on buying additional longer-term Treasury securities and ways to nudge the public into expecting higher levels of inflation in the future. On Wall Street, stocks trimmed their losses, with both the Dow Jones industrial average (DJI:^DJI - News) and the Standard & Poor's 500 Index (^SPX - News) briefly turning higher after the FOMC's minutes came out.

To help shift inflation expectations, policy-makers debated providing more detailed information about what rates of inflation they would prefer, or the possibility of making clear they would tolerate a higher level of inflation on a temporary basis, a policy approach known as price-level targeting.

Krugman: The Reason Government Spending Hasn't Saved The Economy Is That There Hasn't Been Any Government Spending

Paul Krugman goes back on the attack, arguing that the reason the economy is sputtering despite the stimulus is that the stimulus didn't actually include a big surge in government spending. Ask yourself: What major new federal programs have started up since Mr. Obama took office? Health care reform, for the most part, hasn’t kicked in yet, so that can’t be it. So are there giant infrastructure projects under way? No. Are there huge new benefits for low-income workers or the poor? No. Where’s all that spending we keep hearing about? It never happened...
One compelling fact to back this up:
Since January 2009, the total number of government workers in the country has shrunk by 350,000, because state and local governments have been forced to cut back.
Government spending on goods and services, meanwhile, has only risen 3% per year for the past two years, less than it rose in the two preceding years.
So the reason the Keynesian approach hasn't worked, Krugman says, is because it hasn't been tried.

Services gain powers stocks higher; Dow up 200

World markets also rose after the central bank of Japan surprised investors by slashing interest rates to near zero. - NEW YORK (AP) -- Stocks surged to their highest level in five months Tuesday after activity in U.S. services companies powered ahead in September, a hopeful sign for the largest area of the economy and the main source of employment in the country.

A surprise move by the Bank of Japan to slash interest rates also lifted stocks worldwide. The dollar fell as investors shed defensive assets, and a gauge of U.S. stock market volatility fell.

The Institute for Supply Management reported that the U.S. services industry grew slightly faster in September as demand from customers improved. It was the ninth straight month of expansion in services, which have been growing at a slower pace in the U.S. relative to the much smaller manufacturing sector.

The U.S. Can't Be the World's Court

May 27, 2009

Wall Street Journal -

John B. Bellinger III, Adjunct Senior Fellow for International and National Security Law

A federal judge in New York recently allowed a lawsuit to proceed against General Motors, Ford and IBM for aiding and abetting crimes against humanity committed by the apartheid government in South Africa. And a lawsuit against Royal Dutch Shell for alleged human-rights abuses in Nigeria is scheduled to begin today in Manhattan. We may be on the verge of a new wave of legal actions against U.S. and foreign corporations in American courts.

The U.S. government can and should be a strong voice for redress of human-rights abuses around the world. But these lawsuits, which are being brought under the 200-year-old Alien Tort Statute, are likely to cause friction between foreign governments and the Obama administration. Congress should step in and clarify the types of human-rights cases that may be heard.

The Alien Tort Statute was part of the first Judiciary Act of 1789, and it gives federal courts jurisdiction to hear suits brought by non-U.S. nationals for offenses "committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States." It was intended to promote diplomacy and international commerce by allowing foreigners to bring suit in federal courts for offenses not recognized by state law in the 18th century.
The statute was virtually unused until 1980, when the Second Circuit permitted a suit by two Paraguayans against a former Paraguayan government official for the torture and murder of a family member in Paraguay. That landmark decision opened the door for international human-rights litigation, and the number of suits under the Alien Tort Statute has grown substantially in the last three decades.
In the 1980s, most of the cases involved suits by foreign nationals against officials of their own government for conduct that occurred in a foreign nation. By the 1990s, however, the focus had shifted, with plaintiffs bringing more suits against U.S. and foreign corporations -- not for direct abuses but primarily for aiding and abetting human-rights abuses by foreign governments.

Shell plans rapid North American growth - FT

By Ed Crooks in New York

Published: September 29 2010 00:21 | Last updated: September 29 2010 00:21

Royal Dutch Shell is planning a rapid expansion of its North American business to raise production by 40 per cent to 1m barrels equivalent per day in 2014, including gas, Canadian oil sands and deepwater oil.

The strategy, announced in Canada on Tuesday, is part of Europe’s largest oil company’s plan to meet its “aspiration” of producing 3.7m barrels per day in 2014, compared with 3.15m last year.
The company had previously set an objective of producing 3.5m b/d by 2012.
BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster and weak natural gas prices have raised concerns about the outlook for the industry in North America, but Shell intends to make the region the focus of its global expansion in the coming decade.

The Fed Makes And Mints Money

The most profitable bank in the United States of America isn't Jamie Dimon's JP Morgan Chase or the rejuvenated Bank of America. In fact, it doesn't have any ATMs, and it pays out almost all its earnings to you and your neighbors.
It's the Federal Reserve, which is expected to post another year of record profits in 2010.
In recent years, America's central bank has come under criticism — much of it justified. Under former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and his successor, Ben Bernanke, the Fed slept through the housing/subprime bubble, did a poor job of regulating banks and failed to forecast the deepest recession in 80 years.

http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/110863/for-uncle-sam-the-fed-prints-and-mints-money?mod=bb-budgeting