Your customized headlines for Sat, Mar 31, 2012

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria's finance minister, is Africa's standard-bearer in the contest to become World Bank president. Jose Antonio Ocampo, a former Colombian finance minister, is being championed by South America.

BERLIN — European finance ministers agreed Friday to give a temporary boost to the total capacity of their bailout funds, bringing it to $933 billion, in a bid to persuade investors that they are serious about helping struggling countries repay their debts.

Visa and MasterCard on Friday were trying to determine the extent of a possible security breach at a third-party vendor that experts say could compromise the credit-card and debit-card information of millions of Americans.

After spending millions of dollars for a management consultant to analyze its operations, the Securities and Exchange Commission said a shortage of money will limit its ability to act on the recommendations.

I'm in Kansas City for an economics conference put on by the Kauffman Foundation. I came because it sounded like fun. But we're four hours into it and I'm really, really depressed.

The first panel saw economists Brad DeLong, Tyler Cowen, Scott Sumner and Karl Smith talking about the U.S.'s long-term growth potential. Smith was fairly sunny. He sees a recovery coming, and thinks it will be strong. The others were terribly pessimistic. The consensus was that, at best, economic performance will be underwhelming over the next decade. So let me try my hand at a more optimistic scenario — or, at the least, at an explanation for why we might be overly pessimistic right now.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria's finance minister, is Africa's standard-bearer in the contest to become World Bank president. Jose Antonio Ocampo, a former Colombian finance minister, is being championed by South America.

After spending millions of dollars for a management consultant to analyze its operations, the Securities and Exchange Commission said a shortage of money will limit its ability to act on the recommendations.

- Former Senator - and, more importantly, former lottery winner - Judd Gregg has some Mega Millions tips to share.

- Meanwhile, residents of Georgia spend 1 percent of their personal income on lottery tickets.

The White House announced today that it is moving forward with tough new sanctions aimed at squeezing Iranian oil exports. Iran currently exports about 2 million barrels of oil a day — roughly 2.5 percent of the global market. So how will the world make up the shortfall?

The authors are Donald Marron and Eric Toder. The abstract:

The federal government is larger than conventional budget measures suggest. Many tax preferences are effectively spending programs. Adding these preferences to federal outlays and receipts makes the government appear about 4 percent of GDP larger. The 1986 tax reform cut these benefits, but they have since rebounded to a larger share of GDP than before. Using this broader measure of government size, many base-broadening reforms viewed as tax increases would be reclassified as spending cuts. Raising marginal tax rates would be recorded as a tax increase and a spending increase because it would boost the value of many tax preferences.