Marketplace - American Public Media

There's a lot the rest of America needs to understand about the Texas economy says Erica Grieder, author of "Big, Hot, Cheap and Right: What America Can Learn from the Strange Genius of Texas."

It's a big claim, "but I think we are big enough to support it," she jokes.

Grieder is a senior editor at Texas Monthly. She says the state's success stems from their staunch support of business. "It's a model that emphasizes growth."

It may seem simple, but many outside of Texas don't understand how much the state supports business through subsidies and incentives.

"If you're talking about an issue in Texas, any issue -- it could be totally unrelated or seemingly unrelated to the economy, Texans always put it in terms of the economy."

For example, spending on the arts: "Here [in Texas], we'd say, arts contribute $6 billion a year to the economy, therefore, support the arts," she says.

Grieder acknowledges the challenges that come with the pro-business attitude. The state has a high rate of poverty, but she says that's always been true, even in the very earliest days of its founding.

"It's not the case that we've driven half the state into poverty while the other half gets rich," she says. "It's a state that's had a high level of poverty and still does."

That could change in the future, she says, with social investments.

You probably can't talk about Texas and the economy without talking about oil. "If not for oil, the state wouldn't have the boost that it had, certainly in the beginning of the century," she says.

By now, Texas is really about energy -- not just oil. They've diversified their portfolio with developments in wind energy and shale gas.

It's not just the oil boom in the early 1900s that laid the groundwork for a pro-business state.

In Texas, "people have always seen business as kind of a friend to their cause." Infrastructure was built slowly in Texas so it was necessary to turn to external forces -- like private enterprise -- to do things the government couldn't do.

Business continues to shape politics in the state. Grieder points to the Republican Party that runs the state.

"I think the Tea Party people would like to cut the budget even further in Texas," she says, "and the business community at the moment is the one saying, 'actually, we can't really gut the schools because then we won't have any workers to hire."

The man who tried to sell his coveted Google Glass on eBay, to the dismay of fellow devotees, says he figured he had the right to do it. 

The seller, who goes by raenblow on the Internet auction site and by Ed in real life, took the listing down this week after bidders offered more than $95,000 for a device he didn't even own yet. 

Ed, 26, wouldn't give his last name because he's "sick of being harassed by Google enthusiasts." 

He says he didn't think the $95,000 bid was real, but he wanted to sell his glasses to pay off student loans. 

Google Glass is an Internet-ready gadget that a select group of users will wear like a pair of glasses. A few early adopters have already picked up their glasses from Google headquarters, and a few thousand more will receive a pair later this spring. 

Ed says he was part of a group that won the #IfIHadGlass Twitter competition. Google asked candidates to tweet innovative ideas for ways to use the technology. The winners, who the company calls Explorers, still have to pay $1,500 for the right to be an early user. 

Ed says he pitched the idea of sending photos to his marketing clients while working from the road.

"I assumed that if I pay $1,500 and they give me something, it would be mine to do whatever I wanted with. Apparently that is not the case," he says.  

Apparently not. 

Google would not comment for this story, but the company confirmed that the terms of service for the Explorers prohibit reselling, loaning or transferring the glasses to another person. The company can deactivate a device if someone else uses it.

Ed says he did not know about the rules because he hadn't yet picked up his glasses or paid for them. When he learned of the rules he says, "I took down the auction voluntarily."

The auction prompted a wave of disgust from other Explorers who felt the attempted sale violated the spirit of Google's competition.

Kevin Dietze, a student at Georgia Institute of Technology, posted a link to the auction on a chat group for Glass Explorers. He says this wasn't the first time he'd seen a Google Glass for sale. He purposefully wanted to sabotage this one by getting people to artificially inflate the price.

"The reason why I posted it in the first place was to prevent the auction from completing," Dietz says. "The whole idea of being a part of the Explorer program is not about getting Google Glass or turning a profit. It's about being on the cutting edge and this person clearly doesn't care about that."

Another Glass enthusiast, Jim McNelis of San Francisco, says he was bothered by "someone who thinks they should make over a year's salary because they were picked in a competition on Twitter."

McNelis was among a smaller group chosen last year to receive the new product. He says he picked up his Google Glass at the company's headquarters Tuesday. McNelis put the device on his face and used it to do an interview through his cell phone with Marketplace.

He explained the experience this way: "Visually, I am looking in the lens and I can see the call has been going on for 46 seconds." 

It's this type of technology that Google has a real interest in protecting, says Angela McIntyre with the tech research firm Gartner. Especially so early in the test phase, she says competitors would be willing to pay a lot of money to take a peek at the technology inside.

"There's a lot of hype around Google Glass and many people would love to get their hands on one," she says. "Even if it's deactivated once you resell it."

Mike Henderson knows trucks. He’s president of a company called Smart Truck, and he had a problem.

"Trucks," he says, "are fairly unaerodynamic devices. Half their fuel goes to defeating aerodynamic drag.”

But he needed to make his clients’ semi-trailers more fuel efficient to comply with California law -- and fast. Trouble was, calculating airflow is crazy complicated.

There are all kinds of vortices. "Almost every piece of a truck produces wake and they mix with other wakes," Henderson says. "It would take over a week to do a single calculation" to see how a single part would interact with a whole truck.

And he’d need to do hundreds of calculations.

So Henderson did what a growing number of businesses are doing: He managed to get access to a supercomputer. Not just any supercomputer, but "the most powerful computer in the world for open science," according to Suzy Tichenor at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Titan, as the $100 million supercomputer is known, is nearly the size of a football field.

"It clocks in at about 27 petaflops, which is the equivalent of 27 quadrillion calculations or operations a second," Tichenor says. A quadrillion is a million billion. "It’s a big boy."

Labs and businesses – even small businesses like Henderson’s -- can apply to use it. It’s free if they make some of their results public, thereby fulfilling Oak Ridge’s goal of promoting advancement in science and engineering. Henderson was able to test prototype trucks that existed only inside the computer before going to the trouble of making real parts. His team saw air movements that would’ve been invisible in a wind tunnel.

"It probably got us to market a year faster than we would have had we not used it," he says, adding that he improved trucks’ fuel efficiency by 14 percent by adding special airfoils.

Tichenor says other businesses have been banging down the door for a crack at Titan. The number of applicants has risen 20 percent in the past year.

"We’ve definitely seen a growth in the number of companies that are applying because modeling and simulation allows you to accelerate the research and development process dramatically," she says.

That includes auto companies which would rather not build a hundred different cars just to crash them all, insurance companies modeling how fires spread and biotech companies too.

Not only have firms been applying to use government supercomputers, they’ve been buying up their own.

"The market has been growing at a rate we’ve never seen before," says Earl Joseph with international market research company IDC. The company has been tracking the computer industry for two decades. Joseph says a medium size supercomputer costs $10 million, but they’ve been selling like hotcakes even through the recession.

"Supercomputers grew 65 percent in 2009 alone, last year sales grew another 29 percent. You’re not seeing those growths in any other sector right now," he says.

There are a few reasons supercomputers are now a $5.5 billion industry. "The questions, the problems that users are looking to solve are becoming more and more complex," says Barry Bolding at supercomputer producer Cray, which made Titan. Demand for Cray’s computers has increased five-fold over the past five years.

BP, for example, has an array of seismic sonar devices the size of Manhattan. Processing the echoing sound waves to suss out the contours of oil and gas deposits beneath the ocean floor is an immense computational task. Another factor: Computers have become faster by incorporating processors known as GPUs that were developed for the gaming industry.

Earl Joseph, at IDC, says the next milestone in supercomputing will be something called an "exascale machine," a thousand times faster than Titan.

"The biggest problem right now is the electrical bill," he says. "To build that big of a computer you almost need a nuclear power plant right next to it." The annual electricity bill could run anywhere from $30 million to $50 million.

He says someone will probably figure a way around that though, as governments and companies alike run a supercharged race to build computers that are ever more super.

Driving in New York City is hard enough, try finding a parking space. Some residents will try anything to secure a good spot, including, apparently, painting the curb a different color.

According to the New York Times, officials are considering higher fines for people who do it, calling it "street defacement." The fine now stands at $50, but could jump to $250.

Parking in the Big Apple is already big business, says lawyer Larry Berezin. He runs the website NewYorkParkingTicket.com,  which is dedicated to defending parking violators.

"Parking in New York City generates about $600 million in revenue and there's about nine million parking tickets issued a year," Berezin says.

Tickets are overseen by the Department of Finance, so New York has an incentive to keep that revenue flowing. As Berezin puts it, it's not about justice.

However, there are ways to effectively contest one of NYC's 99 parking violations.

"The mistake many New Yorkers make is that they fight it emotionally," Berezin says.

For example, hollering, "How dare you issue me a ticket?! I was just dropping my Aunt Tilly. She's 94 years old, and I got out of my car and walked across the street."

You can stop temporarily and let Aunt Tilly out at the curb, Berezin says, but you can't walk her across the street. "She's on her own. She lives in New York City... she's okay."

For a guide to deciphering New York City's complex parking signs, see the presentation here.
We asked you on Twitter what your parking and driving pet peeves were, and boy were you vocal. Add your own by commenting below or tweeting us @MarketplaceAPM.

[View the story "What are your driving and parking pet peeves?" on Storify]

What if you could get a degree from a college with no classes, no instructors and no grades? It sounds like an ad on late-night TV. But this week, the online College for America got a big boost from the federal government. Its students will be able to receive federal student aid.

“What that really means, is that for the first time federal financial aid dollars will support actual learning as opposed to how long somebody sat at a desk,” says Paul LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire University, the nonprofit school that created College for America.

Instead of racking up a certain number of credit hours for an associate degree, students at College for America have to master 120 “competencies,” from quantitative reasoning to writing and communication.

If you’re good at math, you might fly through that assessment, LeBlanc says. If not, you could take one of the many free online courses offered by other schools. The program costs $2,500 a year.

“It’s conceivable that someone could earn their Associate's degree in under six months and for $1,250,” LeBlanc says.

Right now the online program is only available to people who work at certain companies. One of them is Globe Manufacturing, in Pittsfield, N.H. It makes firefighter suits.

Competency-based degrees will not only help his workers get ahead, says owner Rob Freese. They’ll also help him assess their skills.

“It’s like getting merit badges that sort of prove competency in various subject areas,” Freese says.

Though it’s the first to gain eligibility for federal aid without using the traditional credit hour, College for America isn’t the only program experimenting with competency-based learning. It took inspiration from Western Governors University, which was founded in 1997. The University of Wisconsin plans to launch self-paced, competency-based degree programs this fall.

“Given what college costs right now, finding ways to shorten the amount of time that it takes to earn a degree is a priority,” says Sara Goldrick-Rab, associate professor of educational policy studies at UW-Madison. “However, I will say this: I think the higher priority ought to be on lowering what college costs, so that you don’t have to rush through it.”

The skills you pick up in the process of learning, she says, are important to employers, too.

Have you checked your cell phone bill lately? I mean like line-by-line, page by page? If you do, you may find a few charges that you didn’t authorize. It’s a practice called “bill cramming” and while it used to be a big problem on landlines, it has been on the rise on mobile phone bills.

This week the Federal Trade Commision cracked down on the practice for the first time, says Malini Mithal, the assistant director in the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection’s Division of Financial Practices. She said the defendants in the case were “offering dating tips and horoscopes and other types of services via text messages,” then adding the charges to the users' cell phone bills.

Mithel said many of the consumers who complained to the FTC had deleted the messages or responded texted "Stop" and they were charged anyway. Sometimes as much as $9.99 a month.

"It’s a consumer fraud," she said.

Expect more of these scams, says John Breyault, with the National Consumers League in Washington, D.C.

“The mobile platform is more vulnerable to fraud because it’s a platform that’s becoming a more acceptable form of payment,” Breyault said.

In the 1990s, when phone cramming hit landlines, Breyault says phone companies eventually agreed not to allow third-party charges. But, he says, that’s not really an option today because people like buying legitimate services and charging them to their cell phone bills.

Ruth Susswein is with the Consumer Federation of America. She says consumers need to guard their information. 

“You don’t want to give your cell phone out just to anyone,” she says.

Susswein said the main issue is that paying with your cell phone is largely unregulated. And many consumers say cell phone carriers are slow to refund — or just don’t refund — unauthorized charges.

Her suggestion: pay with a credit card because the law offers them more protections.

The explosion on Wednesday at a fertilizer plant in the tiny city of West, Texas, has sparked conversation in heartland American towns that have their own fertilizer plants -- or hope to soon.

“I’m reviewing my legislation,” said Illinois Rep. Adam Brown, who has been working to attract the Chronus Chemical company to the town of Tuscola in Central Illinois. Brown, who said Illinois is "in competition" with neighboring Iowa for the plant, said the benefits are clear. He expects the plant would bring $1.2 billion in investment money to the area and create 2,000 union jobs.

But after the explosion in West, he wants more information. “We want to ensure not only that we have huge job creation here in Central Illinois, but that also our workers and our community is projected,” Brown said.

Chronus Chemical says what happened in West, simply couldn’t happen with their planned facility.

“We do not produce, use, or store ammonium nitrate in the Chronus facility,” said Dave Lundy, a spokesman for Chronus. “What Chronus will be producing is urea and urea is not combustible. It’s generally viewed as inflammable.”

Across the state line, in the small town of Wever, Iowa, Kristen Brookhiser, a mother of three, said her heart sank when she heard the news from West, Texas.

“I am concerned about explosions, leaks in the air, how soon would we be able to be notified and would be have enough time to evacuate if we needed to be,” Brookhiser said.

Wever broke ground on a fertilizer plant last fall. Brookhiser said she supports job creation, but objects to the how close the plant is to residential areas.

Ever wonder how the government calculates inflation? Meet George Minichiello. He's searching through the meat aisle of a Brooklyn grocery store.

"Here it is," Minichiello announces, "pork roast. And the pork roast today is $3.99, I'm sorry, $3.49 per pound. Same as last month."

Next he looks for bacon, but can't find the price. He heads over to the cashier and gets the price from her.

"Okay," he notes, "the pound of bacon is priced differently. Last month it was on sale for $3.99, today it's the regular price of $6.99."

Minichiello's an economic assistant for the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). He's out at different types of stores four days a week.

The BLS has hundreds of people like George. They go out to their local stores and write down the prices of certain items. The bureau then uses the prices to calculate inflation. It's quite a process.

"I have pharmacies, service organizations like dentists, opticians, grocery stores, large department stores, small bodegas," Minichiello says.  "You know, I almost hate to shop after doing this all day."

But at up MIT in Boston, Alberto Cavallo's found another method for gathering inflation data. Using the Internet.

"Okay," he says, pulling up a list on his computer screen. "So on April 8th, the Coca Cola Cherry Coke is $1.99. The caffeine free Pepsi soda is $1.69."

Back in 2007, Cavallo started collecting costs of online goods. He has a computer program that scans websites' HTML codes, and scrapes out all the prices.

"In the U.S.," he explains, "the estimates of inflation we were able to obtain with online data do in fact match very well the ones produced by the statistical offices in the country."

He gets the same inflation numbers using online methods as the BLS does sending out people like Minichiello to stores.

Cavallo's method evolved into The Billion Prices Project. The project now grabs about a half a million prices a day. And while the government bureau comes out with monthly inflation numbers, the Billion Prices Project gives the inflation rate daily. Using a lot fewer employees.

The BLS has taken notice. Michael Horrigan heads the office there in charge of inflation numbers. Lately, his bureau has started looking to Cavallo and the Billion Prices Project for guidance.

"We really wanted to learn what sort of what the process was, what the methodology was," Horrigan says. "But it also introduced us into the world of webscraping."

He sees online price gathering as a promising way the bureau can cut down there data collection costs.

"You know," he continues, "this is a day and age where we're trying to figure out ways in which we can deal with the current budget situation."

Both Horrigan and Cavallo say it's too soon for the bureau to only rely on web prices. The actual costs of things like services and real estate are still tough to gather online. But, Horrigan says the government agency will slowly be using more of the Billion Prices Project's methods.

And Alberto Cavallo at MIT? He's already thinking about the next index he'd like to re-imagine with big data: the gross domestic product.

Today, the tech world today brings you hits from the 80s and 90s: Microsoft and IBM are expected to report healthy earnings today. But what is up with Apple? It’s stock fell again yesterday, and is down 40 percent since last fall.

Today Germany's parliament approved a $13 billion rescue package for Cyprus. The overwhelming yes vote came after a warning from Germany's finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble that if Cyprus was allowed to go bankrupt, other euro zone countries would be at risk.

Thanks to a string of scandals that have damaged the reputation of China’s domestic food supply, more and more among the country's rising consumer class are turning to imported foods.

Oil prices were up about one percent this morning, but they remain at their lowest level in nine months after dropping ten percent this month. Gold, which was also up slightly this morning, is around a two year low.

Diane Swonk, chief economist with Mesirow Financial, joins Marketplace Morning Report host Jeremy Hobson to explain why commodity prices are falling and how the U.S. economy could benefit.

Authorities in Boston have flagged video and other images of a possible suspect in the marathon bombings. The Associated Press says there's no identification yet. The U.S. Attorneys' Office and the FBI have been releasing official reports about their investigation, but there's also been amateur sleuthing taking place online at sites like Reddit and 4Chan.

"I think that Reddit is where it pops up the most because [it's] a really popular community that is kind of networked in a way that gives it a lot of visibility," says Adrian Chen, senior writer at the news site Gawker. "But you've [also] got conservative bloggers, you've got people on Twitter, other message boards -- basically wherever anybody is talking on the Internet."

Online postings include time-lapse animations of people seemingly fleeing the bombing scene, and people with backpacks staring unsmiling along the marathon route. Though these efforts may be in good-faith, most, if not all of the people deemed suspicious were most likely not involved.

"This is not an inherently terrible idea to try to sift through some of these pictures to help the authorities, that's if everything goes right," says Will Oremus, a tech writer at Slate. "If everything goes wrong, you've got a lot of people out there who have been identified by their face as possible terrorists and they are totally innocent."

Though Oremus says the idea that “Redditors” could solve a crime isn't too far-fetched.

"A year or two ago, there was a hit and run incident, a photo was posted to Reddit, some gear-head noticed that the headlight belonged to a 1990 Cadillac, he knew the make and model, and they ended up solving the crime," says Oremus. 

To hear more about the implications of a public, crowdsourced manhunt, click on the audio player above.

Correction: The original version of this article misspelled the name of Gawker writer Adrian Chen. The text has been corrected.

Authorities in Boston have flagged video and other images of a possible suspect in the marathon bombings. The Associated Press says there's no identification yet. The U.S. Attorneys' Office and the FBI have been releasing official reports about their investigation, but there's also been amateur sleuthing taking place online at sites like Reddit and 4Chan.

"I think that Reddit is where it pops up the most because [it's] a really popular community that is kind of networked in a way that gives it a lot of visibility," says Adrien Chen, senior writer at the news site Gawker. "But you've [also] got conservative bloggers, you've got people on Twitter, other message boards -- basically wherever anybody is talking on the Internet."

Online postings include time-lapse animations of people seemingly fleeing the bombing scene, and people with backpacks staring unsmiling along the marathon route. Though these efforts may be in good-faith, most, if not all of the people deemed suspicious were most likely not involved.

"This is not an inherently terrible idea to try to sift through some of these pictures to help the authorities, that's if everything goes right," says Will Oremus, a tech writer at Slate. "If everything goes wrong, you've got a lot of people out there who have been identified by their face as possible terrorists and they are totally innocent."

Though Oremus says the idea that “Redditors” could solve a crime isn't too far-fetched.

"A year or two ago, there was a hit and run incident, a photo was posted to Reddit, some gear-head noticed that the headlight belonged to a 1990 Cadillac, he knew the make and model, and they ended up solving the crime," says Oremus. 

To hear more about the implications of a public, crowdsourced manhunt, click on the audio player above.

A year ago, Marketplace Tech host David Brancaccio drove solo across the country trying to deal only with technology and no people, as part of a Marketplace series called Robots Ate My Job.

Jamie Kitman, New York editor for Automobile Magazine, is now trying to make the drive the other way -- meeting as many interesting human beings along the trip as he can. Kitman, who is driving a $240,000 McLaren MP 4-12C sports car, caught up with Marketplace Tech on the second day of his journey. He had just completed a visit with an Arizona company -- Local Motors -- that has a fascinating way to design cars: the crowd.

An event planned for today to launch the new Digital Public Library of America has been postponed, due to the bombings in Boston earlier this week. But the ambitious online archive will go live as planned.

To see some of the 2.4 million archival materials going online today, you once would have had to go to a special collections room at a research library and don a pair of white cotton gloves.

As of 12pm eastern time today, you can just type dp.la into your browser.

“For the first time, ordinary people will be able to actually see material that had been kept behind closed doors and out of reach of the public,” says Robert Darnton, university librarian at Harvard. Its contributions to the digital library include the first daguerreotypes of the moon and scores from Mozart and Schubert.

The goal is a single portal to access digitized content from collections across the country, says David Ferriero, archivist of the United States, “which is going to have a huge impact on how researchers -- and anyone who’s curious -- goes about finding information in the future.”

Some librarians worry the new library could hurt traditional ones.

“We don’t want funders -- particularly folks at the state or local level -- to think that ‘oh now we have this big digital library in the cloud, we don’t need to support our public libraries,’” says Ken Wiggin, state librarian for Connecticut.

“We in the library field and all of our supporters have to do the very best we can to help the funders and decision makers understand that this is an enhancement and not a replacement for today’s library,” says Maureen Sullivan, president of the American Library Association.

Traditional libraries, Sullivan says, offer programs and services -- and an atmosphere -- you can’t get online.

Updated (9:00am EST): Union Pacific reports first-quarter revenues were up 3 percent, despite a drop in the amount of coal and grain the railroad shipped. According to UP's earnings report, which came out Thursday morning, revenues totaled $5.3 billion in the first quarter. The growth was attributed to higher shipments of chemicals, automotive products and intermodal containers. 

The success of big companies like UP may tell us something about which industries are doing well. And with that in mind, here's a look at what's on board American trains, industrywide -- starting with coal. In 2011, it made up 43 percent of all U.S. rail freight, according to the Association of American Railroads.

But "coal shipments are down dramatically," says the group's CEO, Ed Hamberger.

He blames the crash on environmental regulations and competition from cheaper natural gas. Rail companies need to be "quick and nimble" to adapt, he says. And it looks like they are, according to Page Siplon, who runs the Georgia Center of Innovation for Logistics.

"Sand and oil and water from the fracking industry -- and all the products associated with it -- has become a new market for them," Siplon says.

And don't forget building supplies. There's more lumber on American trains thanks to the improved housing market.

Supply chain expert Mary Holcomb says the automotive industry is also speeding up.

"That's really a staple and a mainstay for the railroads," she says.

Car shipments will not close the coal gap completely. But they're up 21 percent this quarter compared to the same time two years ago.

Train shipments fell drastically during the recession, but started to recover in 2010 and have continued to grow year over year. The first quarter of 2013 was 5.3 percent higher than the first quarter of 2012.

Today Germany's parliament approved a $13 billion rescue package for Cyprus. The overwhelming yes vote came after a warning from Germany's finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble that if Cyprus was allowed to go bankrupt, other euro zone countries would be at risk.

The BBC's Steve Evans in Berlin joins Marketplace Morning Report host Jeremy Hobson to discuss the bailout and the mood in Europe.

Investors got hit on the head yesterday, when a key Apple supplier issued a gloomy earnings forecast. It cited an unnamed customer. Since last fall, Apple stock has underperformed both gold and the economy of Greece. What gives? "Wall Street was expecting everything to go perfectly for Apple. We’ve now had little bits of bad news and unexpected news, like the iPhone 5 -- not as much earth shaking product as people thought," says Henry Blodget at Business Insider. "You have competitors coming into the market whose products are equaling Apple’s."

That’s code for Samsung. Its new smartphone is out later this month. Blodget thinks the fantastically profitable iPhone is near the end of its life cycle. And the question, as always, is what’s Cupertino got next?

Some analysts whisper that Apple’s R&D folks are unprepared for a tech future of big data and artificially intelligence -- a hint of how unfashionable the company’s become, for now.

In the past five days, Apple's stock price has plunged from over $430 to $395, falling significantly yesterday when a key supplier issued a gloomy earnings forecast.





Over the past year, Apple's stock has had a bumpy ride. Since hitting a peak last fall, its value has slid by 40 percent.



  If you were looking to buy a smartphone, what kind would you buy?

Several South American Presidents are gathering today for an emergency meeting today in Lima, Peru. They will be discussing the electoral victory of Nicolás Maduro in Venezeula. Maduro will be sworn in tomorrow, while the vote counts are being disputed.

Stephen Keppel, economics editor at Univision News, says the slim margin of victory could make it difficult for Maduro's government to achieve economic reforms.

"This will make it hard to impose big economic plans or to increase the nationalization of the economy," Keppel says. "Nicholas Maduro is no Hugo Chavez -- he doesn't have the charisma, his government won't have the same money that Chavez's had."

Venezuela is suffering from inflation, food shortages, lower oil revenues, and a government that is running out of money. Keppel says these economic struggles may diminish the country's role abroad.

"Chavez supported a number of countries in Latin America -- particularly Cuba and some other countries in Central America. That is going to decline under a Maduro presidency, partly because he doesn't have the same relationships, but also because his government won't have the same resources."

To hear more about the ongoing situation in Venezuela, click on the audio player above.

Today's final note brings with it a shake of the head and a 'no, c'mon...you're kidding, right?'

From the Federal Reserve, we have news that some of the checks sent to victims of foreclosure abuse — robo-signing, wrongful eviction — have bounced.

The good news is that it seems to be a paperwork snafu, not actually insufficient funds in the $3.5 billion settlement account.

But still.

When Yuri Valazza started a small imported food shop in Shanghai eight years ago, his target consumers weren’t Chinese.

"At that time it was almost 90 percent foreigners," recalls Valazza, sitting at a small table in shop in the city's former French Concession neighborhood.

Not anymore, thanks to a rising consumer class and a string of scandals that damaged the reputation of China’s domestic food supply, nearly half of the business here at Valazza’s shop comes from local Chinese. And what are they buying?

"We see a lot of fresh milk being bought a lot, yogurt, especially, anything that children tend to eat, aby foods," says Valazza.

One of Valazza's sales clerks feeds the day’s catch through a money counter. Valazza’s shop, Feidan, saw a 30 percent increase in revenue last year. Imported food is an $18 billion business in China, thanks to consumers like Zhang Qi, a 33-year-old lawyer who browses the aisles with his three year-old daughter.

"With imported food, if the label says it’s organic, I trust that," says Zhang, "Food made in China -- especially children’s food -- is often labeled organic, but it’s easy to fake that. So we’re sticking with imported food, organic or not."

And that’s good news for American companies like Organic Valley, which started exporting milk to China three years ago. CEO George Siemon says his consumers in China aren’t just looking for the organic seal.

"You also have the USDA seal of quality control," says Siemon, "So it really is a double premium that we’re able to offer people."

And the premium for Organic Valley is China-sized revenue growth: After studying the market, the company estimates sales of its milk in China will go from $4 million today to $100 million in five years.

Feidan customer Zhang Qi says all this new imported food may be a catalyst for change. He says it’s sure to put more pressure on Chinese food companies to raise their standards.

Or not. China’s government is placing more and more restrictions on food from other countries. It’s a move aimed to protect Chinese companies at the expense, says Zhang, of health-conscious consumers like him.