Labor/Economy

The Federal Open Market Committee offered its thoughts about the U.S. economy once again on Wednesday, and came out more optimistic than it’s been in a few months.

The euro-zone crisis has been somnolent lately, but over the weekend it returned to mini-panic mode in a hurry when word broke that as part of Cyprus’ bailout, the EU wants depositors in the island nation’s banks to pay a 6.75 percent tax on their deposits up to 100,000 euros, and a higher tax on deposits higher than that.

The middle class in the developing world will indeed be developing quite rapidly in the next two decades, according to the United Nation’s Human Development Report 2013.

The Census Bureau reported on Wednesday that U.S. retail and food services sales for February increased by 1.1 percent compared with January, and 4.6 percent compared with February 2012.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ JOLTS said that there were 3.7 million job openings on the last business day of January, little changed from the last business day of December.

The rush of U.S. bank failures that began with the financial panic more than four years ago has crawled to a trickle.

In creating 236,000 jobs in February, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, the economy surprised on the upside, since some economists had fretted that the looming sequester might have made employers nervous.