The News

nytimes.com — Fisker Automotive, a small California-based manufacturer of luxury vehicles, on Tuesday is expected to reveal plans to build plug-in hybrid electric cars at a former General Motors plant in Delaware.

The White House said Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is scheduled to visit the plant, near his hometown of Wilmington, for an announcement about its future. G.M. closed the plant, which was the last automotive factory on the East Coast, in July as part of its post-bankruptcy restructuring.

Fisker’s plans will mark the first major redevelopment of a piece of the old G.M., which is now a separate company charged with disposing of unwanted assets in order to repay G.M.’s creditors. It also will be among the rare instances in which an automotive plant has resumed building vehicles after being shuttered; most are eventually torn down or converted to other purposes.

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solveclimate.com — At a time when rates of joblessness continue to rise in America, a new study upholds the promise of a major jobs boost from a green economy.

The study, released this week by the non-profit American Solar Energy Society (ASES) and Management Information Services (MIS), found that an aggressive and immediate build out of renewable energy and energy efficiency (EE&RE) would net at least 4.5 million new jobs by 2030 (meaning, the figure accounts for the number of jobs that could be lost in the transition to a clean energy economy).

Many of these jobs "could not easily be outsourced," the authors said.

The study arrived at the same time that climate change legislation continued its march through the U.S. Congress. Opponents of the bill claim that its clean energy policies could cost the U.S. trillions of dollars and many millions of jobs over the next several decades. The AES/MIS research refutes both these claims.

The groups' latest study builds on earlier work. In early 2009, ASES and MIS released a report concluding that an aggressive scale up of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies could generate some $4.3 trillion in revenue in the United States by 2030. The analysis was based on an analysis of six technologies: energy efficiency, concentrating solar power, solar photovoltaics, wind power, biomass power, biofuels and geothermal power.

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nytimes.com — Goldman executives are perplexed by the resentment directed at their bank and contend the criticism is unjustified. But they find themselves in the uncomfortable position of defending Goldman’s blowout profits and the outsize paydays that are the hallmark of its success. For Goldman employees, it is almost as if the financial crisis never happened. Only months after paying back billions of taxpayer dollars, Goldman Sachs is on pace to pay annual bonuses that will rival the record payouts that it made in 2007, at the height of the bubble. In the last nine months, the bank set aside about $16.7 billion for compensation — on track to pay each of its 31,700 employees close to $700,000 this year. Top producers are expecting multimillion-dollar paydays.

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nytimes.com — Bowing to political pressure from community bankers, the House Financial Services Committee approved an exemption on Thursday for more than 98 percent of the nation’s banks from oversight by a new agency created to protect consumers from abusive or deceptive credit cards, mortgages and other loans. The carve-out in legislation overhauling the regulatory system would prevent the new consumer financial protection agency from conducting annual examinations of the lending practices at more than 8,000 of the nation’s 8,200 banks, leaving only the largest banks and other lenders subject to the agency’s examiners.

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latimes.com — The dark and largely unregulated market of derivatives, which helped trigger the financial crisis, moved closer to federal oversight as a congressional committee voted to impose new rules on the products to try to limit the risk they can pose to the economy. The 43-26 vote by the House Financial Services Committee was a key step for the Obama administration's plan to overhaul Washington's oversight of the financial system while shedding more light on complex investments.

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washingtonpost.com — The Obama administration won its first major victory Thursday in its effort to overhaul the nation's financial system as a key House committee passed a bill to regulate exotic financial instruments known as derivatives. Trading in derivatives -- contracts used to bet on the movement of stocks, bonds, commodities and other things -- magnified last year's financial crisis by forcing companies to record bigger losses as markets collapsed. But for years policymakers had rejected regulating the derivatives market, worried about stifling financial innovation.

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