Tmi. We have breaking economic news. Ism, nonmanufacturing index, has just come in below economist estimates. Michael mckee has the headlines. We are looking for 54. 7. A run ofe had such good economic business. It is disappointing when you look at the numbers underneath the headline. We saw the new orders index fall below 50, which is roughly fit dividing line for expansion or roughly the dividing line for expansion or contraction. The Business Activity index did not move at all. Concern but ite is something to watch. The thing everybody wants to talk about is that jobs report on friday, the unemployment and dekes rises. There may be some good news in this report. We will have to wait five days to find out. Tmobile and Verizon Wireless are swapping airwaves in a deal announced earlier this morning. It may tmobile him more attractive takeover target. Cristina alesci joins us now. It is a wonderful day for bankers. Payinge is essentially 2. 4 billion for low band spectrum. It is a kind
The face of very tight and unusually tight fiscal policy for this period. It has been effect it, but the it has been effective but the precisesize of the impact is something that we can very reasonably disagree about and we can and work will continue. The uncertainty of the impact and the effects of ending programs and so on, one of the reasons we have treated this as a supplementary rather than as a primary tool. Don lee l. A. Times. Unemployment benefits are expiring shortly for millions of people. How much of an Economic Impact do you see that having . What effect would you expect that would have on the Unemployment Rate . If those people drop out of the labor force, will that not the Unemployment Rate down quite a bit . Yes, obviously it has a big economic effect on those directly affected who are receiving benefits. We do have an unusually large number of longterm, Unemployed People in the u. S. It is a major concern and one that i cited in my opening remarks. The effects of exten
Planning. It is months and months to close down a base. If you just look at the physics of this, in an antiseptic world, and afghanistan is not antiseptic, it takes months to get all this done, just to get out. And to get to the end place of our 2014 ending our combat mission there. Then we are asking our commanders and budget hers and our allies our budgeters and our allies to start with commitments for the coming year when they have no idea what that means. No leader can commit their country, or the military, or any of their resources to their nation or any other nation without some certainty of what that is. We have pulled back on some of our historical roles in brazil, and our program today is focused on i o diversey issues and climate biodiversity issues and Climate Change issues. We have a few alternative energy programs, but this does not represent the future of our developed assistance program. However, it does represent the future of our commercial engagement, our investment e
Second, we need to empower citizens with information and tools to make the governments more effective and accountable. Third, we need to build a Global Movement to prevail over corruption. The World Bank Group will be creating a single pool of technical experts in rule of law, public sector, financial him and state management and public sector, financial, state management, public improvement. We know that we and our partners have had an impact. For instance, when corruption threatened to derail the Critical Power project for Southern African countries, the world bank intervene, preventing more than 6 million from being misused. In afghanistan, we supported a network for integrity and reconstruction, which trained 980 people who have monitored 281 Infrastructure Projects with 247 million. 83 of the concerns they raised have been addressed. Through Innovative Solutions in key sectors like engineering and consulting, we have convinced major firms to commit to clean business practices. We
Some of the most exciting things we are seeing are related to the other major shift. Here is one experiment. In afghanistan, we have given afghani women cell phones. They can take pictures of projects in action. They can transmit them to our office. It has a feature that if they are stopped on the road side, there is one button they push and gets rid of the pictures. It does not put them in danger. We give them access to Cell Phone Services and give them a concrete way of monitoring corruption. We also protect them in case they get stopped. Citizen voice will not go away. If there is anything we have learned from the arab spring, everybody can twet and go on facebook. If you bring together best practices with citizen engagement, that is a great path. You have to have delivery. I started off with a Nonprofit Agency to try to improve government. The slogan i got from Thomas Edison is appropriate. Vision without execution is hallucination. [laughter] we have a lot of vision here about dea