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The Federal Open Market Committee will spend two days reading the tea leaves of recent and coming economic reports in trying to decide how to align interest rates with an economy that, depending on whom you ask, is either rolling along or stumbling toward its demise. The Fed’s meeting begins Tuesday and concludes with an announcement and press conference Wednesday afternoon. The betting money is on the Fed once again leaving its benchmark lending rate unchanged. While the Fed mulls its decision, Democratic voters in the District of Columbia will be closing down the 2016 primary season with the final contest. Although 46 delegates are at stake, they aren’t likely to make a difference in determining the party’s nominee, and most political types expect Bernie Sanders to throw his support to H ...

It will be a quiet week in Washington, with both houses of Congress out for an extended holiday. Plenty of electoral action down south, however, where two Democratic primaries are scheduled for next weekend. On Saturday, 12 Democratic delegates are at stake in the Virgin Islands, while on Sunday voters in Puerto Rico apportion 67 delegates. Those contests clear the deck for the big prizes of California, New Jersey and several other states on June 7. Google can’t catch a break. European regulators have the company under the microscope trying to determine if Google has abused its market power in search and advertising. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission might have reopened a probe into whether Google’s search practices are anticompetitive. And on Tuesday, anti-monopoly authorities in Russia a ...

The presidential primaries roll on Tuesday, with Kentucky holding its Democratic primary and Oregon conducting both its Republican and Democratic primaries. Look for two Bernie Sanders wins that nonetheless barely dent Hillary Clinton’s delegate lead. On Saturday, meanwhile, President Obama begins a weeklong visit to Vietnam and Japan. President Obama has led a nation at war longer than any other American president – longer than Roosevelt, Johnson, Nixon or Lincoln. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee examines part of that record on Tuesday at a hearing titled “War In Syria: Next Steps to Mitigate the Crisis.” The use of mandatory-arbitration clauses in contracts in everything from financial services to education has drawn the attention both of regulators and of their overseers. On Wedn ...

Puerto Rico has until the end of the business day on Monday to make a $422 million Government Development Bank bond payment, but few people are holding their breath. “On Monday there will be a default,” Puerto Rico’s governor, Alejandro García Padilla, said last Wednesday. Even if it reaches an agreement to delay a default, a much bigger obstacle looms: a $2 billion debt payment due on July 1. Some $800 million of that payment is constitutionally guaranteed, giving it legal priority even over the funding of essential public services, such as police patrols or drinking water. Things aren’t much better in Atlantic City, where the troubled municipality could miss a bond payment of a mere $1.8 million that is also due Monday. Bankruptcy is a possibility, with Standard & Poor’s saying in Ja ...

The Justice Department has charged multiple FHA lenders with fraud under the False Claims Act recently, leading to an exodus from the FHA program and reduced opportunities for working-class Americans to get home loans. In his recent letter to shareholders, for example, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, said the bank had dramatically reduced its FHA lending because the government charges excessive penalties for even the most modest mistakes. On Thursday afternoon, a House Judiciary subcommittee will examine the Justice Department’s use of the False Claims Act, a Civil War-era law, to target FHA lenders and others with fraud charges. A common element of DOJ’s billions of dollars of settlements with FHA lenders has been to require them to contribute funds to liberal activist groups or othe ...