Economy

In headlining Thursday’s “House call” protest against health-care reform, U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann was going rogue on her own party’s leaders, who had hoped to focus the day’s attention on their own 12-hour, online health-care “town hall.”

Gov. Tim Pawlenty unveiled a proposal on Tuesday to amend the state’s constitution in order to keep a lid on government spending. His plan would cap the size of the state’s general fund budget at the amount of revenue received in the previous two year cycle. But according to figures compiled by the Senate Majority [...]

Gov. Tim Pawlenty believes Minnesota has a “binge” spending problem. In order to fix this addiction, he’s proposing a rather radical solution: an amendment to the state’s constitution that would strictly limit future expenditures. Democrats say it’s simply a stunt to bolster Pawlenty’s presidential ambitions.

US Bank is putting its brand on nine banks, but it’s not necessarily an indicator of a robust economy: the Minneapolis-based bank, a division of US Bancorp, is assuming the assets and most of the debts of nine banks that closed on Friday. It was a record-setting day: It’s the most banks closed by the [...]

“Mr. Secretary, I’m not a man that fears this administration or you,” Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.) told Geithner. “But I do fear the accumulation of power exercised by someone in the future that can be extraordinary.”

The Minnesota Council of Nonprofits (MCN) announced today that the organization will support the health care reform package moving through Congress, but only if it includes provisions for nonprofit agencies.

Minnesota is among 22 states that have had to borrow money from the federal government to pay unemployment benefits during the ongoing economic crisis. The state’s unemployment insurance system is currently more than $155 million in debt, according to a new report.

A protracted partisan skirmish has left hundreds of thousands of Americans without unemployment benefits — an impasse Senate Democrats hope to break this week.

In 2000, evangelist Chuck Ripka says he had a vision from God: He was to start a faith-based bank in Otsego, and with the backing of the Lord his Riverview Community Bank could not fail. In fact, God told Ripka that he would create such an “acceleration” in the bank’s success that Ripka would be [...]

Pity the U.S. Senate committee witness who tries to slip a fishy statistic past Al Franken. The fearsome Harvard math major punished conservative economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth for claiming that Democrats’ reforms would jack up bankruptcies for medical reasons.