WASHINGTON — Highlights from the Federal Reserve’s survey of economic conditions nationwide. The survey, released Wednesday and known as the Beige Book, is based on information collected from the Fed’s 12 regional bank districts.

BOSTON

(This region covers Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and part of Connecticut.)

The region’s economy grew. Manufacturers saw revenues rise, and many expect demand will improve gradually through the rest of this year. Some firms noted a ‘choppiness’ in business activity. Retail sales were mixed, with many merchants worried about sagging consumer confidence. Most companies were holding the size of their work forces steady.

NEW YORK

(This region covers New York and parts of Connecticut and New Jersey.)

The economy showed more signs of strengthening. Tourism in New York City was robust, helped by a pickup in business travel. Manhattan hotels said occupancy rates rose to a record high for May and stayed strong in June. Broadway theater attendance was brisk. Retailers said sales met or beat expectations. Sales of clothing were healthy. But sales of big-ticket appliances were sluggish. Auto sales retreated a bit, but are up from a year ago. Factories reported some ‘leveling off’ in activity. The commercial real estate market was mixed, although office leasing […]

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SAN ANTONIO — As Congress debated the healthcare bill, many critics lamented it would do little to transform a system in which doctors and hospitals bounce patients around in an uncoordinated, costly, sometimes tragic process.

But something unexpected has happened since President Obama signed the legislation in March. Spurred in part by the law, many independent providers across the country are racing to mold themselves into the kind of coordinated teams held up as models for improving care.

In some places, the scramble is so intense that physician groups and hospitals are putting aside rivalries and signing new partnerships almost daily.

‘It’s kind of like the Oklahoma land rush right now,’ said Patrick Carrier, a veteran hospital administrator who heads Christus Santa Rosa, a group of Catholic hospitals in San Antonio. ‘Everyone has their wagons lined up and they’re getting ready to go.’

Three of San Antonio’s hospital systems are competing to form alliances with local doctors who are giving up their private fee-for-service practices in exchange for paid positions on a hospital’s team.

Healthcare experts have long argued that such a unified approach to medical care offers the best hope for improving quality and saving money.

While a few institutions such as the Mayo Clinic […]

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WASHINGTON - Some of the economic consequences of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill may take years to identify, and BP’s compensation fund should be flexible enough to account for long-term losses, a panel of experts from Alaska’s Exxon Valdez tanker spill told a Senate committee Tuesday.

Some of those damages are difficult to quantify, said Brian O’Neill, a Minnesota attorney who spent two decades shepherding through the court system the lawsuit fishermen and business owners filed against Exxon after its 1989 oil spill in Prince William Sound.

The collapse of the herring fishery, for example, couldn’t be fully anticipated until nearly a decade after 11 million gallons of oil spilled into the sound, he told the Senate Judiciary Committee. And it’s difficult, too, to measure the long-term mental health effects of waiting for two decades for the litigation against the oil giant to be resolved, O’Neill said.

Even while BP works to permanently cap its runaway oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, there are many lessons they can learn from the 1989 oil spill in Alaska, said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who led Tuesday’s meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Exxon, she warned, ‘used every legal trick in the book’ to […]

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Karl Case, an economics professor at Wellesley College and co-creator of the S&P/Case-Shiller home-price index, discusses the U.S. housing market. The S&P/Case-Shiller index of property values increased 4.6 percent in May from the same month a year ago, marking the biggest year-over-year gain since August 2006, the group said today in New York. Case talks with Tom Keene and Ken Prewitt on Bloomberg Radio’s ‘Bloomberg Surveillance’ (This report is an excerpt of the full interview. Source: Bloomberg)

About 18.9 million homes in the U.S. stood empty during the second quarter as surging foreclosures helped push ownership to the lowest level in a decade.

The number of vacant properties, including foreclosures, residences for sale and vacation homes, rose from 18.6 million in the year-earlier quarter, the U.S. Census Bureau said in a report today. The ownership rate, meaning households that own their own residence, was 66.9 percent, the lowest since 1999.

Lenders are accelerating foreclosures as borrowers fall behind in mortgage payments after the worst housing crash since the Great Depression. A record 269,962 U.S. homes were seized in the second quarter, according to RealtyTrac Inc. Foreclosures probably will top 1 million this year, the Irvine, California- based data company said in a July […]

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When you hear the Republicans talk about fiscal responsibility, you should really just laugh in their faces. Consider this:

A US federal watchdog has criticised the US military for failing to account properly for billions of dollars it received to help rebuild Iraq. The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction says the US Department of Defence is unable to account properly for 96% of the [$9.1 billion allocated for Iraqi reconstruction]. Out of just over $9bn (£5.8bn), $8.7bn is unaccounted for, the inspector says. […]

The funds in question were administered by the US Department of Defence between 2004 and 2007, and were earmarked for reconstruction projects. But, the report says, a lack of proper accounting makes it impossible to say exactly what happened to most of the money.

When liberals say that Republicans use the federal treasury for looting, this is what we mean. Maybe you object to spending tax money on hunger or health care for kids. Maybe you don’t want blacks and latinos to get a helping hand from the federal government. But how do you feel about the Department of Defense losing track of 8.7 billion dollars? We gave them over […]

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