Just days after the administration said it was eliminating hundreds of unnecessary regulations, House Speaker John A. Boehner fired off a letter blasting President Obama for a 15 percent increase in the number of new rules and demanding cost estimates for some of them by the time Congress returns from break.

“This year the administration’s current regulatory agenda identifies 219 planned new regulations that have estimated annual costs in excess of $100 million each,” the Ohio Republican wrote in a letter to Mr. Obama Friday. “That’s almost a 15 percent increase over last year, and appears to contradict public suggestions by the administration this week that the regulatory burden on American job creators is being scaled back.”

Mr. Boehner repeated an earlier request for a list of all new regulations that would have an economic impact of more than $1 billion...

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Friday stopped short of signaling further action to boost growth, but said it was critical for the economy's health to reduce long-term joblessness.

"It is clear the recovery from the crisis has been much less robust than we had hoped," he said in remarks prepared for delivery to an annual Fed retreat.

Bernanke said the Fed will meet for two days in September instead of the planned one to mull its options to provide additional monetary stimulus, among other topics...

Joblessness looms large in the 2012 race for the White House and with unemployment hovering above 9 percent, on September 6 former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is poised to release his plan to put Americans back to work just days before President Obama plans to unveil his latest jobs bill.

In a Keene, New Hampshire town hall meeting on Wednesday, Romney touted his business experience before a crowd of 200 people, saying it would help him create jobs if he's elected president.

"I think that if you want to create jobs it helps to have had a job, and I have," Romney said. "I want to make this the most attractive place in the world to grow a business"...

There are lots of ways to define a recession – three quarters of negative economic growth, three quarters in which growth is below the rate needed to meet an expanding population, or, as Ronald Reagan said, “when your neighbor loses his job.” A depression, Reagan said, was when “you lose your job.”

For political purposes, recession is when most voters believe the economy is getting worse. So regardless of what the academics say, for Power Play’s uses, recession is already a reality. Its length and severity will likely determine the next chapter of American history.

If the trauma is brief and even modest recovery follows, President Obama may yet be re-elected and cement gains that American Democrats have sought for 70 years. If the hardship deepens or extends to the end of the year, the president will come to yearn for the days of 39 percent job approval ratings...

The Fitch Ratings agency on Tuesday affirmed its AAA credit rating for the federal government, giving the U.S. a boost just two weeks after another ratings agency marked it down for the first time in history.

“The key pillars of U.S.’s exceptional creditworthiness remains intact,” the agency said, crediting the U.S. economy’s pre-eminence and the dollar’s role as the world’s chief reserve currency. The agency also said it gives the U.S. long-term outlook a “stable” rating.

And, wading into the ongoing battle on Capitol Hill, the agency threw its support behind “an appropriately formulated balanced-budget commitment that was explicitly recognized in the budget process” — which could give a boost to the kind of balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution that Republicans are pushing but that President Obama has said he opposes...

President Obama’s approval rating dropped to below 40 percent, an all-time low, according to Gallup’s daily tracking poll.

The poll released Sunday says 39 percent of Americans approve of Obama’s performance, while 54 percent disapprove.

The slide comes as Obama launches a political counteroffensive this week, while he’s weighed down by wilting support among some of his most ardent backers, a stunted economy and a daily bashing from the slew of Republicans campaigning for his job...

The only way President Barack Obama can solve the nation’s economic woes is to adopt “common-sense” Reaganomics, the policy’s architect Arthur Laffer claims in an exclusive Newsmax interview.

Laffer said the White House called him in the spring and asked him to speak to Obama’s former Council of Economic Advisors’ chairman Austen Goolsbee – and he had told him exactly the same thing.

“Reaganomics would fix any economy that’s in the doldrums,” Laffer said. “It’s not a magic sauce, it’s common sense...

AMES, Iowa – After what may be the most politically punishing month of his presidency, President Obama is looking eminently beatable. And that is changing the nature of the Republican nomination fight.

As Republican presidential hopefuls prepared for their first debate three months ago, the political world was convinced that after the daring raid just days before that killed Usama bin Laden, cooling anger over the 2010 Democratic health care law, modest, but steady economic growth and a billion-dollar campaign juggernaut in the making, Obama was a shoo-in for re-election.

Now, as the GOP field gets ready to rumble here in Iowa, Obama looks more and more like a one-term president...

WASHINGTON – The Federal Reserve said Tuesday that it will likely keep interest rates at record lows for the next two years after acknowledging that the economy is weaker than it had thought and faces increasing risks.

The Fed announced that it expects to keep its key interest rate near zero through mid-2013. It has been at that record low since December 2008. The Fed had previously only said that it would keep it low for "an extended period."

Fed policymakers used significantly more downbeat language to describe current economic conditions. It said so far this year the economy has grown "considerably slower" than the Fed had expected. They also said that temporary factors, such as high energy prices and the Japan crisis, only accounted for "some of the recent weakness" in economic activity...

While continuing to cast doubt on the credibility of Standard & Poor’s, several Democrats on Sunday said there is an even greater culprit in the downgrade of the nation’s credit rating: the tea party.

“I believe this is, without question, the tea party downgrade,” Sen. John F. Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, a day that also saw mounting anxieties in world markets over the downgrade among myriad other economic woes worldwide.