Why are Germans protesting the Transatlantic Trade Agreement?  They say the deal would drive down wages, and weaken environmental protection and labour rights.

US President Barack Obama – who is pushing hard for the agreement – says it would create millions of jobs and increase trade by lowering tariffs. He visits the northern city to open a huge trade fair.

German police estimate that more than 30,000 took part in the peaceful protest rally in Hannover.

Many carried placards with slogans that read: “Stop TTIP!”

The demonstrators have also been voicing their anger over the secrecy surrounding the ongoing TTIP negotiations.

“The TTIP between the American continent and Europe is very dangerous for the democracy, for our nature and for the rights of the workers,” protester Florian Rohrich told the BBC.

“The rights in America for workers are much lower. It’s like the Trojan horse. They can’t change our whole system. But they will – because TTIP is written by the groups, by the companies, not by the politicians,” he added.

The negotiations were launched three years ago, and the next round is due to open on Monday in New York.

Defending the TTIP, President Obama has said that the agreement would mean “new growth and jobs on both sides of the Atlantic”.

The TTIP aims to cut tariffs and regulatory barriers to trade between the US and EU countries, making it easier for companies on both sides of the Atlantic to access each other’s markets.

Industries it would affect include pharmaceuticals, cars, energy, finance, chemicals, clothing and food and drink.

Earlier this month, the price of a first-class stamp fell for the first time since 1919. The drop, from forty-nine cents to forty-seven cents, took place following the expiration of a rate surcharge that was enacted in 2014 to help the U.S. Postal Service deal with the aftereffects of the Great Recession. The dip likely won’t matter much to most consumers, but it amounts to a loss of about two billion dollars a year for an organization that lost 5.1 billion dollars in the 2015 fiscal year alone.

Despite the service’s evident money problems, squeezing two more cents out of each letter may seem, to some, like just about the laziest possible way to raise revenue. Contrast that with postal services in other countries, many of which are managing to reinvent themselves: last year, the Singapore Post has opened an e-commerce branch that sells consulting services to companies hoping to reach Asian customers; elsewhere, Australia’s postal service is reportedly testing drone delivery, and Italy’s sells mobile-phone services.

Why does the U.S.P.S. seem to be so comparatively uncreative? Some post offices are offering smaller-scale postal services—an approach that countries like Germany have taken, to good effect. Share Mail allows marketers and political campaigns to send pre-paid flyers or pamphlets that you can forward to friends. “Just like social networking,” he said. To me, it sounded more like the U.S.P.S. was working to make junk mail even more annoying—a hunch that was reinforced when I learned that advertising now makes up more than half of the mail that is delivered. Most of the innovation taking place at the postal service seems to be aimed either at downsizing or making its remaining customers marginally happier, rather than creating new revenue streams by anticipating what Americans might actually want.

The postal service was once central to our social, financial, and intellectual lives. A working paper published in January by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that post offices were crucial to American innovation. The researchers, who studied the relationship between the number of post offices in a given county and the number of patents filed there, found data suggesting that, from 1804 to 1899—a rich period of invention in the U.S.—the establishment of new post offices made people living nearby likelier to file patents. The authors considered several potential reasons for this, from the obvious fact that being near a post office made it easier to file a patent application to the idea that post offices served as a kind of proto-Internet, helping to distribute information to and from counties fortunate enough to have access to them.

The postal service is no longer as significant a manifestation of state power, of course. But the U.S.P.S. still has infrastructural might, in the form of a highly interconnected network of well-placed buildings and people. So here’s a thought experiment: What if we were to reconceive the postal system in light of that network? What more could the service do with its infrastructure?

There is actually an agency within the U.S.P.S. that has been thinking about these questions. Employees could, for example, deliver groceries, alert social-services agencies when people on their routes need help, or, even more ambitiously, supply “wellness services.”

Other proposals from the inspector general’s office would take advantage of the postal service’s buildings—for instance, by allowing post offices to provide basic financial services, like cashing checks, keeping savings accounts, and even taking out small loans. Countries such as Brazil, China, and New Zealand have been doing this for years.

The U.S.P.S. doesn’t have the authority to bring them about. When I asked Reblin about the possibility of getting more creative, he pointed out that, whereas other countries’ postal systems are free to provide non-postal services, U.S.P.S.’s legal mandate doesn’t allow it to do much besides handle mail and packages. Some within the postal system have advocated for the government to change this, but, Reblin said, “My objective right now is to innovate within the law.” The U.S.P.S. also employs thousands of unionized workers who might not be excited about seeing their responsibilities expanded, presumably without a pay raise. And adding new services would, of course, require hiring or retraining employees, as well as reorganizing infrastructure to handle the new work and deal with the related security and privacy issues—significant tasks for an organization under serious financial pressure.

Fees for some of the more innovative new services could potentially bring in significant revenue to offset the costs.

Volkswagen has reached a settlement in principle with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, California regulators, California attorney general’s office and consumers over a plan to fix or buy back nearly half a million vehicles that violated emissions standards.

The deal includes “substantial compensation” for owners of cars powered by two-liter “clean diesel” engines that were fitted with software to cheat emissions tests, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer said in a hearing from a courtroom in San Francisco.

The accord could finally bring about a solution to a crisis that has bedeviled Volkswagen engineers, who have been unable to deliver a fix that was acceptable to the EPA.

Former FBI director Robert Mueller, who was appointed to pursue a settlement, had reached an agreement with all the major parties on a fix for vehicles and a plan to pay vehicle owners.

Volkswagen will also be required to invest funds to “promote green automotive” initiatives, the judge said.

The agreement helps Volkswagen avoid a trial over the emissions violations and economic losses to consumers, which Breyer had threatened to schedule if VW did not meet Thursday’s deadline to reach an agreement.

Attorneys for the U.S. government, state regulators and consumers worked 14 hours a day, seven days a week since a March 24 hearing to reach a deal, the judge said.

To be sure, the agreement is far from the end for Volkswagen’s emissions scandal. For starters, the Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into Volkswagen’s intentional evasion of emissions standards, which was first exposed by the EPA and California Air Resources Board in September.

The company is also facing several investigations in Germany, its headquarters, where it has much larger sales.

Barry Eichengreen writes:  Most obviously, Brexit would damage Britain’s export competitiveness. To be sure, ties with the EU would not be severed immediately, and the UK government would have a couple of years to negotiate a trade agreement with the European Single Market, which accounts for nearly half of British exports. The authorities could cut a bilateral deal like Switzerland’s, which guarantees access to the Single Market for specific industries and sectors. Or they could follow Norway’s example and access the Single Market through membership in the European Free Trade Association.

But Britain needs the EU market more than the EU needs Britain’s, so the bargaining would be asymmetric. And EU officials would most likely drive a hard bargain indeed, in order to deter other countries from contemplating exits of their own. The UK would have to accept EU product standards and regulations lock, stock and barrel, with no say in their design – and would be in a far weaker position when negotiating market-access agreements with non-EU partners like China.

In addition, Brexit would undermine London’s position as Europe’s financial center. It is quite extraordinary that the principal center for euro-denominated financial transactions is outside the eurozone. This attests to the strength of EU regulations prohibiting discrimination within the Single Market. But in a post-Brexit world, Frankfurt and Paris would no longer be prevented from imposing measures that favored their banks and exchanges over London’s.

The City is also an example of a sector that relies heavily on foreign labor. Upwards of 15% of workers in banking, finance, and insurance were born abroad. Attracting and retaining this foreign talent will become harder after Brexit, when EU workers moving to Britain will no longer be able to take their pension rights with them, and the other conveniences of a single labor market are lost.

Brexit could have more mundane, but highly noticeable, effects on Britain. Anyone who has spent time in the UK knows that the single greatest gain in the quality of life over the last generation has been in the caliber of the food. One shudders to imagine the culinary landscape of a UK abandoned by its French and Italian chefs.

Somewhat more weightily, a Britain that is just another middle power would be less able to project military and diplomatic influence globally than it currently is, working in concert with the EU. Although the UK would remain a member of NATO, we have yet to see how functional the Alliance will be in the era after US hegemony.

While the EU has yet to develop a coherent foreign and security policy, the ongoing refugee crisis makes clear that it will have to move in that direction. Indeed, this is the single most ironic aspect of the Brexit debate. After all, British public opinion first began to turn in favor of EU membership after the failed Suez invasion of 1956, which taught the country that, bereft of empire, it could no longer execute an effective foreign policy on its own.

All of which leads one to ask: What can Brexit’s proponents possibly be thinking? The answer is that they are not – thinking, that is. The Brexit campaign is tapping into the same primordial sentiments as Donald Trump is in the US. Most Brexit supporters are angry, disaffected voters who feel left behind. Exposure to international trade and finance, which is what EU membership entails, may have benefited the UK as a whole, but it has not worked to every individual’s advantage.

So the disadvantaged are lashing out – against trade, against immigration, and against the failure of conventional politicians to address their woes. Fundamentally, a vote for Brexit is a vote against Prime Minister David Cameron, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, and the political mainstream generally.

The real problem, obviously, is not the EU; it is the failure of the British political class to provide meaningful help to the casualties of globalization. Within the last month, Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith resigned in protest over the government’s proposed cuts to welfare benefits. And on April 1, the minimum wage was raised. Maybe the voices of the angry and disaffected are finally being heard. If so, the Brexit debate will not have been pointless after all.

Matt Stannard writes:

A former top Federal Reserve policy adviser, and the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, have stunned the banking world by calling for public banks and the breakup of big banks.

Andrew Levin is surely one of the most (formerly) high-ranking monetary policy advisors to call for publicly-owned banks, in this case calling for the Fed’s 12 regional outposts to be made government entities rather than privately-owned banks.At the beginning of this week, he called “for the Fed’s 12 regional outposts to be made government entities, rather than owned, as they have been since their inception more than a century ago, by the banks they regulate.”

And Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari used to be the “bailout czar” in Washington, “charged with overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program during the financial crisis,” according to Jordan Weissmann, senior business and economics correspondent for Slate. In other words, Kashkari helped design TARP and other programs to save the big banks he now wants to break up.

Consciousness of banking as a public utility seems to underlie not only the two gentlemen’s policy ideas, but the media as well. The Reuters reporters who wrote on Levin’s call for public regional fed banks pointed out in their piece that “the U.S. central bank is the world’s only major central bank that is not fully public.”And actually, Kashkari’s call for “turning large banks into public utilities by forcing them to hold so much capital that they virtually can’t fail” is an offhanded call for banking in the public interest.

And beyond just calling for publicly-owned regional banks, it’s pretty significant that Andrew Levin released his recommendations through Fed Up–a grassroots organization dedicated to radical changes in the Federal Reserve. High-ranking officials, and even consultants, hooking up with real economic justice groups seems to be the spirit of the times.

Both Kashkari and Levin are rebutting Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen’s stock arguments that “regulators already have the tools they need,” and, of course, Yellen is nowhere near the concept that banks ought to be publicly owned–even some banks, even really important ones. Levin has a history of harping on Yellen, telling her last September not to raise interest rates.

As Weissmann concludes: “We now have a former politician with establishment credentials who has ascended to a somewhat influential position within the Federal Reserve basically running a campaign to chop banks down to size—or at least make them dull, safe, and certainly less profitable.”

Kashkari is soliciting public opinion, by the way.

James Surowiecki writes:  From the crumbling bridges of California to the overflowing sewage drains of Houston and the rusting railroad tracks in the Northeast Corridor, decaying infrastructure is all around us, and the consequences are so familiar that we barely notice them—like urban traffic congestion, slow-moving trains, and flights that are often disrupted, thanks to an outdated air-traffic-control system. The costs are significant, once you reckon wasted time, lost productivity, poor public-health outcomes, and increased carbon emissions.

Infrastructure was once at the heart of American public policy. Today, we spend significantly less, as a share of G.D.P., on infrastructure than we did fifty years ago—less, even, than fifteen years ago. The U.S. makes no net investment in public infrastructure. Yet polls show that infrastructure spending is popular with a majority of voters across the income spectrum. Historically, it enjoyed bipartisan support from politicians, too. If it’s so popular, why doesn’t it happen?

One clear reason is politics. While both parties remain rhetorically committed to infrastructure spending, in practice Republicans have been less willing to support it, especially when it goes toward things like public transit. This is partly because of the nature of the Republican base: public transit is hardly a priority for suburban and rural voters in the South and in much of the West. But ideology has played a key role as well.

Over the years, the process of getting infrastructure projects approved has become riddled with what political scientists call “veto points.” There are more environmental regulations and more requirements for community input. There are often multiple governing bodies for new projects, each of which has to give its approval. Many of these veto points were put in place for good reason. But they make it harder to undertake big projects. In 2010, Chris Christie was able to cancel a new tunnel under the Hudson River more or less single-handed, even though more than a billion dollars had already been spent on it.

Even more egregious than the lack of new investment is our failure to maintain existing infrastructure. You have to spend more on maintenance as infrastructure ages, but we’ve been spending slightly less than we once did. The results are easy to see. In 2013, the Federal Transit Administration estimated that there’s an eighty-six-billion-dollar backlog in deferred maintenance on the nation’s rail and bus lines. The American Society of Civil Engineers, which gives America’s over-all infrastructure a grade of D-plus, has said that we would need to spend $3.6 trillion by 2020 to bring it up to snuff.

Again, there are political reasons that maintenance gets scanted. It’s handled mainly by state and local communities, which, because many of them can’t run fiscal deficits, operate under budgetary pressures. Term limits mean that a politician who cuts maintenance spending may not be around when things go wrong. There’s also what Erie calls the “edifice complex”: what politician doesn’t like opening something new and having a nice press op at the ribbon-cutting? But no one ever writes articles saying, “Region’s highways are still about as good as they were last year.”

Only when things get really bad willt infrastructure issues get public attention. This is the heart of our problem: infrastructure policy has become a matter of lurching from crisis to crisis, solving problems after the fact rather than preventing them from happening.

Congress tapped the Central Bank for monies this year, but that deal was a one off.  Infrastructure is usually financed by loans in the form of government bonds which are repaid by tolls, and other measures.  Jobs are created.  Structures made whole again.  Obama had a chance to do this in 2008 and did not.  Hard to know whether the next President will take up the important task.

A new report on the state of whistleblower protection in some of the world’s richest countries has found that Germany ranks alongside Argentina, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey as one of the countries that does the least to ensure that whistleblowers can speak out without fear of retribution.

The report, which was co-authored by researchers from Australian NGO Blueprint for Free Speech, Transparency International Australia, Griffith University and Melbourne University, compares G20 countries’ legal frameworks with the commitments they signed up to in the G20’s 2013-14 Anti-Corruption Action Plan, where they agreed:

to ensure that those reporting on corruption, including journalists, can exercise their function without fear of any harassment or threat or of private or government legal action for reporting in good faith

The report found that, while there had been real improvement over the past decade, serious shortcomings remained in the legal systems of most G20 countries – and those shortcomings affected most of the areas potential whistleblowers would be concerned about. Provisions for whistleblowers to remain anonymous when using internal channels to express their concerns were identified as a particular weakness across the G20, as were the rules around disclosure to third parties – including, where appropriate, the media.

The provision of independent bodies and mechanisms to deal with whistleblower complaints and to report on how legal protections were being used were also seen as poor across the countries surveyed. In addition, the authors note that where regulations exist, they tend to apply to the public sector only – governments have been much less active in ensuring that private sector whistleblowers can speak out in confidence.

Some G20 countries, like the UK and Canada, explicitly exclude military and intelligence personnel from their ‘whistleblower’ definition and all the protections in law that derive from that (the report calls this “a glaring gap”). Others, like the United States, have a legislative framework that is well rated – and in theory extends to its intelligence agencies – but in practice apply very different rules, and extreme anti-whistleblower measures, when classified information is involved.

Germany’s poor score in the report might come as a surprise to some, given the country’s renowned worker representation laws and positive reaction to Edward Snowden’s revelations.

The case was brought by Brigitte Heinisch, a nurse who brought the systematic mistreatment of elderly patients to the attention of the healthcare company she worked for. When appeals to management proved ineffective, Heinisch brought legal action against her employers and wrote a leaflet to explain what was happening in the case. The European Court ruled that the public interest in Heinisch’s disclosures outweighed her employers’ right to protect their business reputation and that her summary dismissal had been “disproportionately severe.” She was later awarded compensation by a German court.

In fact, the German legal code only offers limited protection for public officials who are reporting suspicions of corruption – and this came only after a change of the law in 2009. Germany’s employment courts offer limited redress to those who report wrongdoing in good faith, but there remains a strong bias against anonymous reporting and public disclosure. None of the legislative proposals made since the 2011 judgment have attracted the support necessary to secure a change in the law.

Camila Villa Durand writes:  Brazil is confronting a triple crisis: a severe economic downturn, a corruption scandal that has ensnared the commanding heights of the economy and politics, and a government crisis that may soon culminate in the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. Regardless of whether Rousseff is removed from power, the key issue raised by the impeachment threat – her management of fiscal policy – underscores the need to overhaul Brazil’s economic institutions.

In 2014, facing re-election, Rousseff stepped up the practice of running overdrafts in public commercial banks in order to pay for social programs.

In 2015, however, the federal accounting tribunal (TCU) rejected her accounts and accused Rousseff of committing fiscal irregularities. After the TCU decision, she decided to “pay” off these “loans” in December 2015.

It is crucial to rethink Brazilian institutions, notably the central-bank’s relationship with the government.

Technically, a significant part of the repayment of this “borrowed” money came from the distribution of central-bank gains. But what gains? The accounting rules applied to the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB) allow for bi-annual transfers of gains (and losses) to the Treasury, which include unrealized profits. Currently, one of the most important sources is the accounting valuation of foreign-exchange reserves on the BCB’s balance sheet.

Brazil has more than $355 billion in reserves. A 2008 law created a procedure called “foreign exchange equalization,” similar to a swap. The BCB transmits to the Treasury the carrying cost of foreign-exchange reserves (the difference between their profitability, including changes in exchange rates, and the average funding cost) and the result of the currency swaps carried out in the domestic market (which are settled in local money)..

But such a massive distribution of a central bank’s gains can generate potential conflicts with its mission. A monetary authority is supposed to manage the money supply effectively, not generate gains. The BCB’s increasing gains, based on unrealized profits, risk seriously undermining its autonomy.

That autonomy is not based on law. The BCB’s governors have no fixed-term mandate and are supposed to follow the provisions of the National Monetary Council, a politically appointed body. But, since the adoption of inflation targeting in 1999, a certain degree of operational autonomy has been crucial to maintaining the credibility of monetary policy.

So what happened after the BCB transferred its unrealized profits to the Treasury? The government’s “repayment” of its “loans” caused liquidity to grow, forcing the BCB to intervene to meet its key interest-rate target. But open-market operations can be conducted only with Treasury securities: Brazil’s Fiscal Responsibility Law prohibits the BCB from issuing its own.

Even if the Treasury had issued R$40 billion in bonds within a week of the “settlement” of Rousseff’s “loans,” the government could legally have decided not to issue new securities, after all, blocking the proper functioning of monetary policy.

The only institutional answer, formulated recently by Finance Minister Nelson Barbosa, has been to introduce the possibility of central-bank remuneration of bank reserves.

The crucial reform is to permit the BCB to issue its own securities.

Central bank bonds are a critical tool – especially for emerging countries – for managing the domestic monetary effects of huge amounts of foreign assets, particularly with respect to liquidity. Such instruments can ensure the central bank’s autonomy in managing money, while stimulating the development of the local bond market.

Brazil has an opportunity to restructure its key economic institutions, by combining the creation of new monetary tools with an overhaul of the relationship between the BCB and the Treasury. 

Why is the US President meeting with the head of the Federal Reserve Bank?   What does this say about the Fed’s political independence?

Two expedited, closed meetings in a row accompanied by a meeting with the president and vice president in between, which the White House, itself, associated with these closed-door meetings, that is so rare it required special White House defense as to what would not be happening in the president’s meeting between these two sessions.

The first meeting was nominally to talk about setting interest rates, which the FOMC will be meeting to consider again later this month, having just postponed their scheduled increase in March.

The fact that it is a bank supervisory matter makes it sound like a particular concern, not a general discussion about supervisory policy. Something is the matter somewhere that requires an immediate meeting right after another immediate meeting … behind closed doors.

This all comes very close to sounding like some bank somewhere is in trouble, and the trouble is big enough to call a special meeting of the very august board of governors right after they just had a special meeting.

Why so many last-minute meetings behind closed doors and with the president and vice president at a time when all major central bank heads in the world will be meeting with finance ministers in Washington, DC. Here are some hot issues going on this same week.

Has a recession already begun as the  Atlanta Fed revises US GDP down again.

The president’s meeting with the Fed and the Fed’s two meetings were all called right after the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank revised the revisions of its previous revisements to say the US economy now looks like it will report in for the first quarter at 0.1% growth.

The last number is within a rounding error of going negative and is less then the margin of error for their data. It was only back in February that the Fed anticipated a cruising speed of 2% growth for GDP in the first quarter. They have revised that number down almost every week.

Of course, the fact that the Fed and the President called an unscheduled, closed-door meeting to include the VP does not mean there is any connection between the events.  The independence of the Fed is at stake.  Who has imagined, since 2008, that the US Fed is independent?

The President has been acting outside the bounds of propriety in the last month.  He endorsed the highly unpopular head of the Democratic party in her re-election race.  The head, Debbie Wasserman Schulz has twisted the party mechanisms to favor Mrs. Clinton.  The President then went on national television and climbed the Chinese wall separating his executive office from the FBI and other agnecies investigating Mrs. Clinton’s use not only of an email system located on the Clinton Foundation server, but a server that also hosted the emails of Mrs. Clinton’s husband and daughter. Unseemly at the very least.  Not an investigation about which the President should have any comments at all.  What is the President up to?