IMF chief testifies for second day in French court about her role in arbitration case

PARIS — Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, submitted to a second day of interrogation Friday about her role in the settlement of a multi-million-dollar business dispute when she was French finance minister in 2008. Read full article >>

Obama picks Stein and Piwowar for SEC

President Obama late Thursday nominated two top Senate staffers to fill vacancies expected later this year on the Securities and Exchange Commission.Kara M. Stein, a legal counsel and senior policy adviser to Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), would fill a Democratic slot left open by commissioner Elisse B. Walter. Walter can serve until the end of the year or until a replacement is confirmed. Read fu

Google faces new FTC probe over display ads

Federal investigators have begun probing whether Google is using its increasingly potent position in the online advertising market to undermine competition, an issue officials have monitored since its acquisition of digital ad company DoubleClick in 2008, said people familiar with the inquiry. Read full article >>

Federal worker has 61 years of federal service and no plans to retire

It takes a special kind of person to really appreciate the Consumer Price Index.The CPI measures inflation, and lots of folks pay attention to it when the number (a 0.4 percent decrease in April) is released each month. Read full article >>

Chrysler, Tesla over federal loan repayment

DETROIT — Chrysler Group and Tesla Motors, both led by media-savvy executives, are trading public jabs over the definition of payback.Tesla wired $452 million Wednesday to repay the remaining portion of its U.S. Department of Energy loan, with interest. The company described itself as “the only American car company to have fully repaid the government.” Read full article >>

Institutional Shareholder Services settles civil charges on leaked data

Institutional Shareholder Services, the Rockville-based company that recommends to institutional investors how they should vote in corporate elections, agreed to pay $300,000 to settle civil charges involving an employee who leaked private client data. Read full article >>

Lillian Cunningham: A lesson from Cameroon in letting go of fear

For this installment of our "Micro Management Stories" video series, we interviewed Kah Walla about leadership. Walla ran for president in Cameroon's 2011 elections, and she shared with me her story of being kidnapped before the election and the lesson she drew from it about letting go of your fears. Read full article >>

Jena McGregor: The Boy Scouts' leadership loss

On Thursday, the 1,400 voting members of the National Council of the Boy Scouts of America voted to approve a resolution that would remove the restriction denying membership to youth based on their sexual orientation. "While people have different opinions about this policy, we can all agree that kids are better off when they are in Scouting," the organization said in a statement. "Going forward,

The best sentences we read today

-- "Former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing has revealed he was once jumped on by a panda when he dared himself to enter its cage."-- "You'd think that a fourteenth-century allegorical poem on sin and redemption, written in a medieval Italian vernacular and in accord with the Scholastic theology of that period, would have been turned over, long ago, to the scholars in the back carrel

What you and the Senate need to know about Canada

Senators should be aware of a critical fact, as they debate immigration reform: If we don't want foreign-born talent in the United States, other countries are more than happy to take the talent, and the innovation potential that goes with it, off of our hands. Read full article >>

House approves Republican student loan bill

The House approved a Republican proposal Thursday to allow interest rates on federal student loans to rise or fall from year to year with the government’s cost of borrowing, ending a system in which rates are fixed by law. Read full article >>

'Hybrid innovation': Clayton Christensen Institute introduces new disruption concept

There's a new term in the innovation lexicon.Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor credited with coining the term "disruptive innovation," authored a white paper with colleagues Heather Staker and Michael Horn titled "Is K 12 blended learning disruptive? An introduction of the theory of hybrids." In it, the authors introduce "hybrid innovation", which is described in a re

Tom Fox: Great leadership books for your summer reading list

As summer approaches, there are a number of good books you may want to consider that will not necessarily make the top 10 lists but that will provide food for thought. These books are not mysteries, psychological thrillers, romance novels or historical fiction. These are books that offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dram

Jon Gruber on one reason to keep taxing corporate income

MIT economist Jon Gruber writes in:Nice piece on the corporate tax. But you don't mention one important issue and to my mind the main argument for the corporate tax: if you don't tax corporate income, then you don't tax the earnings until it is released to shareholders. That is akin to the problem with taxing foreign income -- you give an incentive for companies to hoard the money rather than

Sorry, Chuck Grassley. Obama isn't 'packing the court.'

D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals nominee Sri Srinivasan won unanimous approval Thursday by the Senate. But before he did, his nomination led to one of the more amusing moments on C-SPAN in recent memory.Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) used a hearing on Srinivasan's nomination to accuse the Obama administration of trying to "pack" the D.C. Circuit. And then repeated the accusation another five times

Seven thrilling facts about carbon taxes from the CBO

Sure, Congress isn't exactly on the verge of passing a carbon tax. But the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) keeps releasing detailed analyses of the proposal anyway — just in case it comes up as, say, part of a broader budget deal. Read full article >>

California Obamacare premiums: No 'rate shock' here

Health insurers will charge 25-year-olds between $142 and $190 per month for a bare-bones health plan in Los Angeles.A 40-year-old in San Francisco who wants a top-of-the-line plan would receive a bill between $451 and $525. Downgrade to a less robust option, and premiums fall as low as $221. Read full article >>

READ: President Obama's speech on the future of the war on terror

_As prepared for delivery._ It's an honor to return to the National Defense University. Here, at Fort McNair, Americans have served in uniform since 1791 standing guard in the early days of the Republic, and contemplating the future of warfare here in the 21st century. Read full article >>

Let's get rid of corporate taxes altogether

Forget trying to make Apple pay higher taxes. How about if we don't make them pay any taxes at all?Mitt Romney got roundly mocked for saying, "corporations are people, too," but he had a point. Talk to tax economists for very long and they'll make a variant of the same argument. The question in corporate taxation isn't whether it's paid by people. Of course it is. It's how much of it is paid

The terrifying rise of the political entrepreneur

In 1999, I decided to leave the headaches of entrepreneurship behind and get a regular Silicon Valley job in an attempt to ride the dot-com wave. My timing was terrible, and by 2001 I had started another company. In that time, however, I learned that the corporate world is comprised of two groups. In one group, there are the entrepreneurs, individuals judged by actual results and forced to live

Have U.S. states figured out a way to avoid a global race to the bottom on taxes?

This week'suproar over Apple's tax strategies merely highlighted something that everyone in the tax world already knows. The U.S. corporate tax system is needlessly complex, dysfunctional and needs to be fixed. Could there be an elegant solution right under our noses? Read full article >>

The weirdest square mile of ocean on Earth

Jason Kottke passes along this video of the Lembeh Strait, which is known to divers as "the planet's most intriguing and bizarre square mile of ocean floor." The Seas Strangest Square Mile. from Shark Bay Films on Vimeo. Read full article >>

How our community colleges are falling behind

Pop quiz: What's the biggest category of college or university in the United States? Is it big public research universities like UC Berkeley or the University of Texas at Austin? Or is it their private equivalents, like Boston University and Brigham Young? Maybe all the small liberal arts colleges, like the University of Mary Washington or St. John's in Annapolis have, between them, the most stu

Everything you need to know about Obama's war on leakers in one FAQ

There's been a blizzard of news about the Obama administration's crackdown on government officials who leak classified information to the media. Last week we learned that the government seized the phone records of more than 100 Associated Press journalists. This week we learned that the government had accused (though not charged) journalist James Rosen with a crime for accepting classified infor

Poverty is growing twice as fast in the suburbs as in cities

At some point during the 2000s, America reached an unexpected milestone: There are now more poor people living in the suburbs than in the inner cities.That stat comes from a big new Brookings Institution book by Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube, _Confronting Suburban Poverty in America_. They find that between 2000 and 2011, the number of suburban poor in the United States grew by 64 percen

Mortgage rates are trending upward

Mortgage rates moved higher for the third week in a row, according to the latest data released by Freddie Mac.The 30-year fixed-rate average jumped to 3.59 percent with an average 0.7 point. It was up from 3.51 percent last week but down from 3.78 percent a year ago. Until last week, the 30-year fixed rate had remained below 3.5 percent for more than a month. Read full article >>

Yikes! The Japanese stock market cratered overnight

Well that was fast.Japanese financial markets have experienced a stunning rise over the past six months, as a new government led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe introduced policies of aggressive Keynesian stimulus paired with equally aggressive monetary easing by the Bank of Japan. The surest, steadiest bet on global financial markets in that time has been on rising Japanese stocks and a falling

Meet Farzad Mostashari, the bow-tie bureaucrat convincing doctors to go digital

The United States hit a health care milestone Wednesday: Most doctors now use electronic health care records. The new data, released by the Department of Health and Human Services, shows that more than 50 percent of doctors and 80 percent of hospitals have received enhanced federal funding for achieving "meaningful use" of digital records. That means they've gone beyond purchasing the software a

Wonkbook: Bernanke lashes Congress

_Welcome to Wonkbook, Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas's morning policy news primer. To subscribe by e-mail, click here. Send comments, criticism, or ideas to Wonkbook at Gmail dot com. To read more by Ezra and his team, go to Wonkblog._ Read full article >>

IMF chief called to testify in French court about role in arbitration case

PARIS — Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was summoned to testify Thursday about her role in the settlement of a multimillion-dollar business dispute when she was France’s finance minister in 2008. Read full article >>