Media

A trade war is brewing over renewable energy imports between the U.S. and China. Last October, several U.S. solar firms filed a federal trade complaint against Chinese companies for “dumping” solar products on global markets to artificially lower prices with a glut of supply. The complaint also alleged that China unfairly subsidized its industries with land grants, contract awards, trade barriers, financing breaks and supply chain subsidies.

The story as it now stands for Facebook's IPO supports a broader narrative depressingly familiar to most Americans: Which is that the stock market is a rigged game.

David Brooks is no economist and that shows in his recent column about private equity, in which he claims that private equity firms have pushed corporate America to get leaner and smarter. As Paul Krugman pointed out today, nothing of the sort happened -- because, in fact, productivity has not been higher since the advent of LBOs and private equity, starting in the 1980s.

The best defense of private equity is that this industry does both good things and bad things.

Sometimes private equity firms rescue troubled companies, pump in new capital and management talent, and make them better and more productive -- saving or creating jobs along the way.

Other times, though, today's LBO artists buy companies, load them with debt, suck them dry, and accelerate their path to bankruptcy. The bad things private equity firms do are pretty bad; just read Josh Kosmen's book, The Buyout of America.

On the third anniversary of the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act being signed into law, the average debt has declined, but many Americans are still using credit cards as a way to cover basic living expenses, according to a national survey from the policy center Demos.

A national research firm says a recent survey of low and middle income consumers indicates the2009 Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act is helping consumers reduce their credit card debt load.

Public transit in the U.S. is a classic chicken and egg situation: outside of a few metropolitan areas, transit networks are not dense enough to be useful so few people take public transit. If few people take public transit, there is not enough demand or political will to expand transit networks, leading to low ridership, and so on. With this cycle, it becomes easy for politicians to forgo investing the capital and political will necessary to build out transit networks because they can point to low ridership and say there is no public appetite for it.

One big question at the center of the private equity debate is whether firms like Bain Capital intentionally set out to burden the companies they take over with debt -- or whether things just sometimes go sour amid failed turnaround efforts.

The Senate Banking Committee hearings on Tuesday enlightened the public on one extraordinarily important fact. Politicians can be expected to lie, bully, and engage in character assassination to serve the basest of motivations.