Media

It is time to answer two questions:

Washington is finally moving to better regulate the real estate appraisal industry, with regulators yesterday proposing new rules to strengthen appraiser independence.

It's about time.

An interesting proposal will be on the ballot this fall in Michigan. The measure, put forth by Michigan Energy, Michigan Jobs, would increase the state’s renewable energy requirement to 25 percent by 2025, more than double what it is today. The ballot measure would place this requirement in the state’s constitution, which would make it less susceptible to being overturned and also allow citizen’s to dictate the state’s energy future.

Today, the last state enrolled in a federal program designed to keep unemployment checks flowing, Idaho, lost its eligibility.

In 2010, Federal-State Extended Benefits program enrolled over a million people. Why stop the benefits while the national unemployment rate remains over 8%? The Wall Street Journal reports on the reason for its demise:

A Georgetown Public Policy Institute report shows the degree to which the Great Recession has exacerbated the education gap. Not only did workers without a college degree lose “nearly four out of five jobs during the recession,” but the least-educated workers, those without high school degrees, have continued to lose jobs during the recovery.

It's well known that seniors are easy prey for scam artists of every kind. What is less well-known is how big this problem is and how many of the scam artists wear suits and work for major financial service firms. Seniors were major targets of mortgage brokers seeking to push homeowners into subprime loans and win higher commissions. Seniors also get exploited by investment advisors pushing lousy annuity policies and other dubious financial products.

New evidence from the New York Fed suggests that New York’s middle class has continued its slow and seemingly inexorable decline. Coauthors Jason Bram and the James Orr unwittingly reach this conclusion in their exploration of the tension between New York’s record number of jobs and its record unemployment rate. In their exploration, they reveal the inadequacy of our economic measures of well-being and expose the problem beneath the surface.

Sixteen years ago, when Bill Clinton signed a harsh welfare reform law, one upside seemed to be that U.S. society could move past the endless, polarizing debate about welfare dependency.

Ben Protess made an interesting comparison today in a DealBook article on the rise of CFTC Chief Gary Gensler and the agency's successful work on the LIBOR rate fixing scandal: