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At their last meeting, Federal Reserve policymakers explicitly raised the idea of embarking on a third round of “quantitative easing” in order to jolt the economy, according to the just-released minutes of the confab. “Some participants noted that additional asset purchases could be used to provide more accommodation by lowering longer-term interest rates,” the minutes

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What do the unemployed do all day? At a time of record-level long-term unemployment, the question matters — and not just for the jobless themselves. For one thing, if the unemployed aren’t seen as using their time productively, it’s harder to maintain political support for jobless benefits, which some have argued lately are too costly.

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Are the chances increasing that the Federal Reserve will take action next month to jolt the struggling economy? Federal Reserve official Charles Evans told CNBC this morning that he favors “strong accommodation” –that is, policies designed to spur lending–to bolster an economy that is presently moving “sideways.” Evans, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank

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Are the chances increasing that the Federal Reserve will take action next month to jolt the struggling economy? Federal Reserve official Charles Evans told CNBC this morning that he favors “strong accommodation” –that is, policies designed to spur lending–to bolster an economy that is presently moving “sideways.” Evans, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank

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The engineers at Cornell University’s Creative Machines Lab wanted to know what a conversation between two “chatbots” would be like. So they hooked up “Cleverbot” to itself and the following, somewhat testy, exchange took place: (Via Business Insider)

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Welcome to First Look, our daily roundup of early-bird news: • Obama’s job plans may include a tax cut to reward companies for hiring. (Washington Post) • A federal judge puts Alabama immigration law on hold. (Politico) • Most U.S. Muslims say they feel targeted by the country’s anti-terrorism policies. (AP) • Hurricane Irene’s death toll has risen

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Alan Krueger, the Princeton economist who the White House plans to nominate as its next top economics adviser, is a “tremendously good pick,” according to the man he’d be replacing. The Lookout spoke with Austan Goolsbee on Monday; he also ripped the “partisan, poisonous” atmosphere in Washington. Goolsbee, who stepped down earlier this month as

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A  group that wants to create sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms in international waters is distancing itself from the libertarianism of PayPal founder Peter Thiel after a profile of him in Details Magazine drew attention to the effort. The Details profile described billionaire Thiel’s $1.25 million donation to the Seasteading Institute, and speculated that the

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What does the White House’s choice of Princeton economist Alan Krueger to President Obama’s next top economic adviser suggest about the package of job-creation ideas set to be unveiled next week? On the one hand, as we noted earlier today, much of Krueger’s focus has been on issues of employment and wages. His claim to

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Is taking a college course over the Internet just as good as attending an in-person seminar? The nation’s college presidents think so. Slightly more than half of 1,055 presidents of public and private colleges said that an online-only course has the same educational value as an in-person class, according to the Pew Research Center and

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