Your customized headlines for Tue, Mar 20, 2012

During the 2000s, as U.S. manufacturing was transformed by devastating job losses, prominent economists and presidential advisers offered comforting words.

The paring of the manufacturing workforce, which shrank by a third over the decade, actually represented good news, they said. It meant that U.S. workers and factories had become more efficient and that, as a result, manufacturing companies needed fewer people.

The Obama administration announced Monday that taxpayers made $25 billion in profit on a program to keep mortgage interest rates down in the wake of the 2008 meltdown in financial markets.

Building on efforts that began under President Bush, the Obama administration took a number of steps to keep the mortgage market operating after the real estate market crashed, including providing unlimited financial support to mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and buying $225 billion in securities backed by mortgage loans.

When President Obama names his pick to replace outgoing World Bank President Robert Zoellick, that nominee will take over an institution whose role in the global economy is becoming ever more unclear.

In part, the World Bank is a lender. But its biggest borrowers are the rapidly growing powerhouses of the developing world, countries like China and India that can arguably borrow plenty of money on their own from private investors.

WARSAW — Here in Poland, where dreary communist-style apartment blocks still dominate the landscape, the euro was once hailed as a fast-track ticket to the economic big league.

Now, after years of problems in the euro zone, Poles have realized that the big league ticket was in their pockets all along. Their own currency, the zloty, has buffered Poland from the turbulence surrounding it, and few here are in any rush to adopt the euro, even though Poland agreed to do so when it joined the European Union in 2004.

Apple, the world's most valuable company, said it will reward shareholders with a dividend and a share-repurchase program totaling $45 billion over three years, in a departure from the philosophy of its late co-founder Steve Jobs.

The Obama administration announced Monday that taxpayers made $25 billion in profit on a program to keep mortgage interest rates down in the wake of the 2008 meltdown in financial markets.

Building on efforts that began under President Bush, the Obama administration took a number of steps to keep the mortgage market operating after the real estate market crashed, including providing unlimited financial support to mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and buying $225 billion in securities backed by mortgage loans.

— Meet Paul Clement, the lawyer who will argue against Obamacare in front of the Supreme Court.

— "Reliance on untrained labour means the monkeys are winning, the city said."

— The collected doodles of Ronald Reagan.

Greg Smith's New York Times op-ed has brought other ex-Goldman Sachs employees out of the woodwork, including Jacki Zehner, the youngest woman and first female trader to be made partner at the firm. Zehner left the firm in 2002 after 14 years, and she believes that major structural changes in the financial industry have since made it easier for Wall Street firms to become self-serving.

In February, the White House allocated $51.5 million to fight the Asian carp menace threatening the Great Lakes. Few Americans cared. But, as Adam Miniter reports, it was huge news in China, where carp is a delicacy: