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(Reuters) – Oil prices rose more than 2 percent on Monday to their highest since October 2008, after U.S. manufacturing, home sales and jobs data boosted optimism about a recovery in the world’s top economy.

The U.S. service sector grew in March at its fastest pace in nearly four years while pending home sales also rose, according to the ISM industry survey and a National Association of Realtors report on Monday.

Gas Station

That added to optimism following Labor Department data released on Friday showing U.S. payrolls rose by 162,000 last month, the fastest rate in three years.

U.S. crude oil for May delivery settled up $1.75 to $86.62 a barrel. Prices have risen by 8.3 percent since March 26, in their steepest 5-day winning streak since December.

Brent crude rose $1.87 to settle at $85.88 a barrel.

“Economic optimists have taken control of the market,” said Gene McGillian, analyst at Tradition Energy in Connecticut.

“We’re in uncharted territory. I think we can keep trending higher.”

U.S. markets reopened after a three-day weekend that included the Good Friday holiday. London markets remained closed on Monday for Easter.

By ANDREW BATSON in Beijing and DEBORAH SOLOMON in Washington

A U.S. Treasury’s decision to delay making a determination on whether China is manipulating its currency could give Beijing some room to let the yuan rise in value. But some U.S. lawmakers and business groups are continuing to push for a tougher, and faster, approach.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Saturday the U.S. would delay a report to Congress on the currency policies of major trading partners, including China, citing a spate of high-level meetings between China and the U.S. The meetings, he said, “are the best avenue for advancing U.S. interests at this time.”

In a carefully worded and direct statement, Mr. Geithner said the Asian giant was relying on “currency intervention” and must move to a “more market-oriented exchange rate.” A number of lawmakers have called on the Obama administration to label China a currency manipulator in that report, saying Beijing purposefully undervalues the Chinese yuan against the U.S. dollar to give its exports a competitive advantage.

The Treasury had been due to issue its semiannual report April 15. It declined to provide specifics on when it might issue its report, or what sort of benchmarks, if any, it might seek from China over the next few months to show Beijing is sincere about moving on the yuan.

By Michael J. Moore and Rebecca Christie

March 30 (Bloomberg) — Citigroup Inc.’s largest shareholder, the U.S. Treasury Department, is planning to sell its 27 percent stake this year in what could become the biggest profit for the bank-bailout program.
The Treasury will dispose of its 7.7 billion common shares of New York-based Citigroup over the course of 2010 using a “pre-arranged written trading plan,” the agency said yesterday in a statement. The Treasury’s stake had a market value of $32.2 billion as of yesterday’s closing price, for a paper profit of $7.2 billion.

The sale would finish the recovery of $45 billion given to Citigroup from the Troubled Asset Relief Program and bring the Treasury closer to President Barack Obama’s goal of recouping “every single dime” of taxpayer money put into the bank-rescue fund. Citigroup, ranked third by assets among U.S. lenders, took infusions from the $700 billion TARP fund in late 2008 as waning confidence almost triggered a run by depositors.

“This certainly puts a new and improved luster on Citi,” said David Dietze, president and chief investment strategist at Point View Financial Services, which owns Citigroup shares. “They’re still deemed a kind of ward of the government, and the mere fact that they’ll be able to dislodge this unwilling assistor underscores that they have gotten to some minimum standard of health.”

A crane tipped and fell against a commercial building in Lower Manhattan on Saturday evening. There were no injuries, the police said, but four buildings were evacuated and traffic was rerouted.

No one was operating the crane when it fell at 7:10 p.m., the police said, and some cement fell off the building at 80 Maiden Lane. The Fire Department sent numerous trucks to the scene, and firefighters were working to secure the crane.

The base of the crane was in Louise Nevelson Plaza, a slice of a sculpture garden across the street from 80 Maiden Lane.

David Robertson, who lives nearby at 10 Liberty Street, said he had seen the crane being used for work on the building into which it fell.

The property holds an active permit for facade work from the ground to the roof, according to the Department of Buildings Web site.

Mr. Robertson said he was alerted to the crane’s fall by a noise that sounded like metal on metal. “You could’ve heard it half a mile away,” he said.

Tony Sclafani, a spokesman for the Buildings Department, said the agency was investigating.

By Keiko Ujikane March 24 (Bloomberg) — Japan’s exports climbed at the fastest pace in 30 years in February as global trade recovered from the worst postwar recession, increasing prospects for a sustained economic rebound in the nation.

Shipments abroad increased 45.3 percent from a year earlier, helping the trade surplus expand the most since 1982, the Finance Ministry said today in Tokyo. At 5.1 trillion yen ($57 billion), the value of exports remains about a third lower than the March 2008 peak of 7.7 trillion yen.

Demand for Japanese goods rose to all regions for the first time since August 2007, the report showed, fueling sales for companies from Komatsu Ltd. to Mitsubishi Electric Corp. The trade revival has spurred factory production for 11 months, gains that economist Akiyoshi Takumori expects will continue.

“Before, exports were rising mostly because of Asia, but now the U.S. economy is rebounding, too. That’s definitely a good sign,” said Takumori, chief economist at Sumitomo Mitsui Asset Management Co. in Tokyo. “It’s very unlikely that Japan’s recovery will falter this year.”

By Shailagh Murray, Lori Montgomery and Scott Wilson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 22

President Obama will sign landmark health-care legislation into law Tuesday at the White House without waiting for the Senate to deal with a package of revisions that was also approved by the House late Sunday, administration officials said.

Officials unveiled the plan to use a White House signing ceremony to showcase the benefits of the health-care overhaul after a divided House passed the Senate-approved bill and the separate revisions, known as a reconciliation bill, in a marathon Sunday session that culminated more than a year of political discord over Obama’s signature domestic initiative. By a 219-212 vote, the House approved the Senate bill, handing Democrats a historic victory in a long-running battle to reform the nation’s $2.5 trillion health-care system. The vote for the reconciliation bill was 220-211. No Republican voted for either measure.

Amid continuing recriminations over the bill and Republican protests against it, Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Tex.) publicly acknowledged Monday that he was the lawmaker who yelled “baby killer” at Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) as the leader of antiabortion Democrats was speaking on the House floor in opposition to a GOP motion Sunday night. But Neugebauer said in a statement that his remark was misinterpreted and that, in any case, he has apologized to Stupak.

(NaturalNews) Mrs. Bouchard seemed upset.
“I can’t afford health care as yet.”
The new health reform bill
Made her sickly and ill
“But I’d rather have cancer than debt!”

What’s really in Obama’s health care reform bill? Almost no one knows, and here’s why: It’s 1,017 pages long and written in an alien form of bureaucratic English that can barely be decoded by earthlings.

And yet, astonishingly, a U.S. Army translator has been found who speaks “Washington Doublespeak” and he was kind enough to decode the bill and post his plain-language findings over at FreeRepublic.com (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f…).

Below, we reprint what he found in the health care reform bill. As you read this, keep in mind that some of these translations are a bit loose with the interpretations, but I’ve personally spot-checked these points, and they are indeed all contained in the bill in one form or another (shrouded in Doublespeak language, of course).

Editor’s note: I don’t personally agree with every interpretation listed here, and some of the bill’s provisions are actually good ideas (like banning doctors from owning stock in health care companies). But overall, this interpretation points out many alarming provisions in the proposed health care reform bill…

By Mary Jane Credeur and Brendan A. McGrail

March 22 (Bloomberg) — JetBlue Airways Corp., the biggest carrier at New York’s Kennedy Airport, said it will keep its headquarters in the city, rejecting a move to Orlando, Florida.
Employees from the corporate offices in New York’s Forest Hills neighborhood and Darien, Connecticut, will be combined at one new location in Long Island City, Queens, JetBlue said today in a statement.

The decision caps more than a yearlong review of possible new homes and ensures that New York, the largest U.S. aviation market, retains the headquarters of the seventh-biggest domestic airline. JetBlue is the only carrier among the top 10 by traffic that is based in the northeastern U.S.

“After an exhaustive study to determine the best location for our corporate offices, we have decided that remaining in our hometown of New York makes the most sense,” Chief Executive Officer Dave Barger said in the statement.
–With assistance from Mary Schlangenstein in Dallas and Henry Goldman and David Levitt in New York. Editors: Ed Dufner, Steve Walsh

To contact the reporters on this story: Mary Jane Credeur in Atlanta at mcredeur@bloomberg.net; Brendan A. McGrail in New York at bmcgrail@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jamie Butters at jbutters@bloomberg.net

BEIJING — The International Monetary Fund warned the world’s wealthiest nations Sunday to watch their surging levels of government debt, saying it could drag down the growth needed to ensure continued economic recovery.

The economic crisis is leaving “deep scars in fiscal balances, particularly in the advanced economies,” John Lipsky, the IMF’s No 2. official, told the China Development Forum in Beijing. He said that countries that have been going into debt to stimulate their economies should now prepare for belt-tightening steps next year.

“Policymakers should be making it clear to their citizens why a return to prudent policies is a necessary condition for sustained economic health,” said Lipsky, who is the fund’s deputy managing director, according to remarks prepared for the conference.

The IMF projects that gross general government debt in the G-7 advanced economies, except Germany and Canada, will rise from an average of about 75 percent of GDP at the end of 2007 to about 110 percent of GDP at end of 2014, Lipsky said.

This year, the average debt-to-GDP ratio in the wealthiest countries is projected to reach levels that prevailed in 1950 in the aftermath of World War II, Lipsky said. The ballooning of government debt also comes amid rising health and pension spending, he said.

Bernanke makes case for Fed to keep authority over small banks

Top Federal Reserve officials are waging a public campaign to persuade lawmakers that their long-standing authority to regulate banks around the country — including small and mid-size ones — is integral to keeping the central bank attuned what is going on across the U.S. economy.

Chairman Ben S. Bernanke articulated that message Saturday morning in a speech to the Independent Community Bankers of America in which he argued that the Fed is better able to monitor the U.S. economy because of its role overseeing 5,000 bank holding companies and 850 state-chartered banks around the country.

Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) has proposed stripping the central bank of those responsibilities in financial reform legislation that the Senate Banking Committee will take up Monday. The proposal would leave the Fed as the supervisor of only the three dozen or so largest banks.

Dodd and others in Congress have argued that the Fed should be focusing more narrowly on managing the nation’s monetary policy and ensuring the stability of the financial system overall — and are particularly eager for the central bank to face consequences for its mistakes earlier in the decade that contributed to the financial crisis.