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Weekly Wrap

The budget and the Bitcoin

Kai Ryssdal Apr 12, 2013
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Weekly Wrap

The budget and the Bitcoin

Kai Ryssdal Apr 12, 2013
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This week was all about President Barack Obama’s new budget, the continuing rise in the markets and also murmurs of a Bitcoin bubble.

“This budget is dead on arrival,” Bloomberg Government’s Nela Richardson said. And the chained CPI, which is a new way of calculating inflation that tells us how much our Social Security benefits are going to increase every year by allowing for substitution between goods, “would actually reduce benefits a bit. And it would be a step in entitlement reform, but not a very popular one, especially for seniors and Democrats…It’s being used to be a compromise but it’s not really going to work.”

“I think Obama was trying to show that ‘Look, I’m going to do this — I’m going to do the thing that makes my guys really angry; I’m going to minorly tweak Social Security so the benefit payments are a little lower,'” said John Carney of CNBC. “I think he was showing that he was really willing to make a change here, and I think the Republicans, almost irresponsibly, have completely shunned this thing.”

Listen to the full audio above for more on the Bitcoin bubble and bank earnings on the Weekly Wrap.

#Longreads for your weekend

As always, our Weekly Wrappers provide their #longreads picks for the weekend.

Nela Richardson chose:

John Carney picked:

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