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Congress will weigh in on the news that JPMorgan Chase lost $2 billion on complex trades intended to hedge against economic risk, and that the losses could mount.

The Senate Banking Committee on Monday announced future oversight hearings, including one that will look into the trading losses at JPMorgan Chase from a regulatory angle. Lawmakers plan to question regulators, not JPMorgan Chase (, Fortune 500) officials.

Sen. Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, was the first to call for a hearing on Friday.

"Clearly the losses posted by JPMorgan are significant, and as policy makers we should understand in detail what has transpired," Corker said in a letter to Banking Committee chairman Tim Johnson, a South Dakota Democrat.

House Financial Services Committee and House Oversight Committee staff members said they had no plans yet to hold hearings yet.

The JPMorgan controversy comes a little less than two years after a big push for Wall Street reform led to the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act.

On Friday, two senators who helped craft the Volcker Rule — a new, not-in-effectpart of Dodd-Frank that bars banks from making trades for their own profit-chasing purposes — denounced JPMorgan’s trades.

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said last week that the faulty trades would have been allowed under the Volcker Rule, named for former Fed chief Paul Volcker, since the rule appears as though it will allow for economic hedging free instant credit score.

However, Democratic senators Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Carl Levin of Michigan, said they intended the law to ban the kind of trades that JPMorgan Chase traders made. They plan to push regulators to write and enforce a strict ban on so-called proprietary trading and hedging against economic forces.

"The law very clearly already excludes this activity," Levin said in a call with the media on Friday. "It specifically says that every single position that you take as a hedge has got to be tied to a specific risk arising from another specific position. Now, that’s about as clear as you can write. So the regulators are now hopefully going to implement the law as written."

The news has even drawn angry accusations from the political field. Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, has called Dimon to step down from his position as a board member of the New York Federal Reserve.

"This is about accountability," Warren told CNN’s "Starting Point" on Monday. "Jamie Dimon not only is CEO of JPMorgan Chase, he holds this position of public trust, advising the New York Fed on how to regulate risk for these large financial institutions like his own financial institution,"  

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Germany’s finance minister says he’s confident a German-backed pact enforcing more fiscal discipline among European governments will be ratified despite new political uncertainty.

Wolfgang Schaeuble said that the treaty “will be ratified in all countries, I have no doubt about that.”

French Socialist Francois Hollande, who led in the first round of president elections Sunday, has called for renegotiating the pact.

Meanwhile, the Netherlands faces early elections after its minority government collapsed over a failure to agree on austerity measures needed to bring the country’s deficit within EU-stipulated limits.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

BERLIN (AP) _ Germany mounted a spirited defense of its pro-austerity stance on Tuesday, with both Chancellor Angela Merkel and her foreign minister calling for a continued drive for fiscal discipline across Europe in spite of the latest bout of political uncertainty.

Investors took fright of the 17 countries that use the euro Monday on concerns that the so-called fiscal compact of strict austerity and deficit controls agreed by European leaders earlier this year was beginning to unravel.

French Socialist Francois Hollande edged ahead with a narrow lead in Sunday’s first round of presidential elections with a pledge to renegotiate the pact to give greater emphasis to growth over austerity. Meanwhile, the Netherlands faces early elections after its minority government collapsed over a failure to agree on austerity measures.

On top of this, Spain _ which is currently going through a harsh program of cuts and tax increases _ announced it was entering a recession and a survey of purchasing managers across Europe pointed to a contraction in the region’s economy.

Merkel didn’t specifically mention the fiscal pact in a speech in Berlin but noted that, in its early years, West Germany ran up barely any debt. She said that “today, we have to get back to that situation.”

“One can talk about how we do it … but to act as though it were an imposition to get by with what we are earning, (to say) we will carry on carting around the rucksack with debt _ no one will accept it from us, in any European country,” Merkel said.

“I want to say clearly, it is not the case that we say saving solves every problem but, if you at home talk about how you want to shape your life tolerably, then one of the first conditions is that you somehow get by with what you earn,” she said.

Germany’s budget deficit is well under the limit of 3 percent of gross domestic product that eurozone countries are supposed to observe, but its total debt amounts to 81.2 percent of GDP _ well above the official 60 percent limit.

Germany and France, under incumbent President Nicolas Sarkozy, have piloted rescue efforts for other eurozone countries as the region has been swept up in a succession of debt crises over the past two years. Berlin has insisted on an often-criticized emphasis on budget discipline and cuts.

Merkel pushed hard for other European countries to agree to the fiscal compact, designed to limit government overspending, and 25 national leaders signed it earlier this year.

Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said Tuesday that “we agreed on the pact after long negotiations. It is necessary.”

“What we have agreed on in Europe to overcome the debt crisis is agreed and it holds. It will not be made dependent on election results,” he said. “Governments act for their countries and not for themselves.”

It isn’t yet clear when the German Parliament will vote on the pact, which needs a two-thirds majority in Parliament.

That means it needs the support of the main center-left opposition Social Democratic Party, which wants the government to agree to introduce a financial transaction tax _ though leaders have stopped short of saying that is a condition.

Merkel’s government aims to get the fiscal pact passed before the summer. Social Democrat leader Sigmar Gabriel has argued that a vote could take place later.

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China may first relax controls on borrowing costs and widen the

Ever known a woman who drives a forklift?

Neither has Melinda Barbaglia. She has yet to meet one, even though she and her sister sell, service and stock replacement parts for forklift trucks.

“They didn’t teach Forklift 101 at Webster University,” said Barbaglia, who holds a graduate degree in marketing from the school.

A recent Post-Dispatch story that detailed how other cities are outpacing St. Louis in the growth of businesses owned by women struck a chord, for obvious reasons, with Barbaglia. She agrees that female entrepreneurs have been held back by a shortage of support from state and local governmental interests. And she can also make an argument that, to a lesser degree, a male-dominated business community is slow to lose its grip.

At the same time, Barbaglia, her sister Teresa Pippen and mother, Linda, can make a pretty strong case for the ability of a business owned and operated by women to flourish in a good ol’ boy network.

Of the two sisters, Melinda was the one without a single intention of joining C&B Lift Truck Service — the company their father, Charlie, started from scratch 36 years ago.

Degree in hand, Melinda was about to launch a career in pharmaceutical sales when her father suggested he could use an extra hand at C&B.

She reported to work soon after and has been there ever since.

Charlie Barbaglia ran C&B up till the day he and the family celebrated his 60th birthday in 2005.

“He must have thought it was a retirement party, because he never came back to work,” laughs Linda Barbaglia.

“So, I said, ‘I guess we’re on our own, girls.’”

Fortunately, Melinda and Teresa were already immersed in the business.

Melinda, the “take charge” extrovert, applied her education by working the sales and marketing end.

To compensate for the absence of Forklift 101 in the Webster course catalog, Melinda indoctrinated herself in the nuances of pneumatic tires, monotrol transmissions and liquid petroleum to the point that she’s qualified to serve as an instructor in the mandatory safety courses OSHA demands of forklift operators.

Teresa, an introvert with a communications degree from Maryville University, was more than happy to handle bookkeeping and the office side of the business.

C&B’s seven other employees (including service manager Charlie Pippen, the service manager) are all men.

The Barbaglias admit that running a business in what remains a man’s world is not always easy.

For starters, not to stereotype, neither sister plays golf.

As for the other topic that breaks the ice among men — such as sports — the lifelong St. Louisans by necessity can be semi-conversant should the conversation turn to the fortunes of the Cardinals, Blues or Rams. But don’t expect them to tell you how many Detroit Tigers Bob Gibson struck out in the 1968 World Series. The vast majority of the company’s male clients “take their jobs very seriously,” Melinda said.

“They just want their forklift fixed,” Teresa added.

But some of them can be flirtatious, Melinda said.

A lot of years remain before the sisters retire. Melinda is 42 and Teresa is 36.

Still, looking ahead as she cradled Melinda’s 3-month-old daughter Abigail, Linda Barbaglia is fairly sure the second generation of Barbaglias to run C&B Fork Lift Truck Service will be the last.

Linda says the business that has sustained her family for 36 years is fast moving toward the day that favors neither male nor female — when robots take the wheel.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“I was offered an unpaid internship at a law firm but turned it down. If you can’t pay me $10 an hour, you don’t deserve to be in business. The job market makes me feel like stabbing myself in the face. - Adrienne Delibert, unemployed college graduate

Source: The New York Times

BY THE NUMBERS

37 percent of U.S. companies vet job candidates through social networking sites.

15 percent of U.S. employers prohibit the practice.

Source: CareerBuilder

FINAL WORD

“… While my Facebook page is private, my friends do include plenty of people I’ve worked with or for, or might hope to work with or for in the future. I also take it as given that any potential future employer or reference would use all the available tools to check me out – including finding out who we know in common via social networks.

And I think the effects can be subtle: Future employer X calls colleague Y to ask about me; colleague Y checks Facebook to get the latest….and instead of a link to a story I’m proud of, or even a video I find funny, he finds a photo of me and my baby boy making snuggly faces.

Whether he’s consciously wondering when, if ever, I’m going back to work or how dedicated I’ll be when I get there, I’ll never know. But I’d rather not wonder.” - Janet Paskin on a possible pitfall of TMI.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

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Consumer products maker Procter & Gamble Co. is raising its quarterly dividend by 7 percent to 56.2 cents.

The Cincinnati company had been paying a quarterly dividend of 52.5 cents. It pays dividends on common shares certain preferred shares. Its next dividend is payable May 15 to shareholders of record as of April 27.

Procter & Gamble makes Tide laundry detergent, Crest toothpaste, Pampers diapers, and other products.

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Giving Iran another chance at diplomacy, deeply skeptical Obama administration officials return to nuclear negotiations this weekend looking for quick progress _ or at least enough hope to hold off urgent calls from Israel for military action.

The U.S. and other world powers are stopping short of saying the gathering in Istanbul is a make-or-break situation. But as they sit down with Iranian officials for the first time in more than a year to press yet again for an agreement on Tehran’s disputed nuclear program, American officials say the window for a diplomatic breakthrough is closing. And in the event the talks fail completely, all U.S. options remain on the table.

Speaking Thursday after hosting foreign ministers from the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged Iran to prove to the world its claim that its uranium enrichment activity is for peaceful purposes. The U.S. and many other countries fear Tehran is trying to produce an atomic bomb and have challenged Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to substantiate his edict that weapons of mass destruction violate Islamic law.

“We’re looking for concrete results,” Clinton told reporters. “They assert that their program is purely peaceful. They point to a fatwa that the supreme leader has issued against the pursuit of nuclear weapons. We want them to demonstrate clearly in the actions they propose that they have truly abandoned any nuclear weapons ambition.”

The ball is clearly in Iran’s court. Mounting U.S. and European measures are crippling the Iranian economy, with the rial depreciating dramatically under the weight of restrictions on petroleum exports and efforts to cut off Iranian banks from the world financial system. U.S. and European sanctions will get more severe this summer.

Ahead of the talks, chief Iranian nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili vowed to present new initiatives, without specifying what they might be. Iranian officials have suggested scaling back on uranium enrichment while continuing to make nuclear fuel. It’s unlikely such an offer would satisfy the demands of the U.S. and its fellow negotiators _ Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia _ but may illustrate enough of a compromise to justify follow-up talks over the next several weeks.

Iran has been skilled at using negotiations to stall for time. It has reneged repeatedly on understandings reached behind closed doors over eight years of talks, initially with European mediators and later expanded to include the United States and the other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. All the while, Tehran has intensified its uranium enrichment program.

Israel wants tougher action. The Jewish state sees a nuclear-armed Iran as the greatest threat to its existence and has made a point of reminding the world that it sees the threat more urgently than others and that it is prepared to strike Iranian nuclear facilities with or without international support. Israeli military officials believe they’d have to strike by summer to be effective business card templates.

The United States can afford to be a little more patient. But it is dealing with its own clock counting down the time left for diplomacy. The fact that President Barack Obama, too, has committed to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon _ and not simply containing Iran should it acquire one _ means the U.S. might similarly be compelled to act. Adding to the tension is an election season in which Obama’s Republican rivals accuse him of being soft on Iran and weak on defending Israel.

Obama has underlined the need to give time for diplomacy alongside sanctions and fired back at his critics for “beating the drums of war.” But the president also will need some signs of a possible breakthrough to show Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he is to fundamentally change the Israeli calculus. And unless the Iranians break from the mold set at previous gatherings, he will be hard pressed to do so.

Speaking earlier this month in Istanbul, Clinton said Iran could demonstrate its seriousness in a number of ways. She suggested that Iran end its production of highly enriched uranium, which at 20 percent can more easily be transformed into bomb-making material. She also urged Tehran to ship out its existing stockpile of this uranium to another country and open up its facilities to “constant inspections and verifications.”

The most feasible model for a deal may involve an arrangement Iran agreed to in Geneva in 2009, and then quickly walked away from. It involved the Islamic republic shipping out its highly enriched uranium in exchange for nuclear fuel rods. Although Western officials see the contours of such an agreement as still viable, they say it must be updated to represent more than two years of continued Iranian enrichment. Another compromise could see Iran suspend its higher enrichment if the West holds off on some sanctions.

Failure of the process raises the possibility of a military attack that could lead to severe repercussions in the region and around the world. Even if it is the U.S. that chooses to intervene, Iran’s retaliation could come through attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure, attempts to block the strategic strait of Hormuz, or proxy terrorist activity against U.S. allies such as Israel or in instable states such as Lebanon. Conflict also could drive up oil prices beyond their $100-plus per barrel level today and raise gasoline costs worldwide.

For that reason, the U.S. and its European partners are prepared to show some _ but not much _ patience if they can create a framework for progress. It’s an approach that aims to avoid the all-or-nothing stakes of previous meetings that have consistently left world powers with nothing. But they’ll have to get to something quickly.

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Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke defended the central bank

The number has been repeated so often by presidential prognosticators that it’s an article of faith: No president has been re-elected since World War II with an unemployment rate higher than 7.2 percent.

But the stock market turns out to be a pretty good predictor, too.

The Dow Jones industrial average has soared 62 percent since President Barack Obama took the oath of office during some of the darkest days of the Great Recession. The Dow was just below 8,000 then and stands near 13,000 today.

If a recent study of stock markets and presidential elections is any guide, Obama can start preparing his second inaugural address.

“There’s something to this,” says Phil Orlando, chief equity market strategist at Federated Investors, the $370 billion investment firm.

There are plenty of other signs often consulted for their political forecasting power, like whether a team from the National Football Conference or the American Football Conference wins the Super Bowl.

This one makes a little more sense: When the economy picks up and unemployment falls, confident investors put money into riskier investments and stocks rise. Voters are likely to reward the sitting president with another four years.

“The stock market reflects trends in the economy,” Orlando says. And as any political operative can attest, in a presidential campaign, it’s the economy _ you know the rest.

The study was backed by the Socionomics Institute, a think tank studying how a shared mood among a group sways its members’ actions. Their researchers dug up data on economic output, prices, unemployment and stock-market performance and matched them to presidential elections.

They went all the way back to the first re-election in 1792, when George Washington beat John Adams and won a second term as the president.

The researchers found a solid connection between the stock market’s direction in the three years leading up to Election Day and the election results. Gains of 20 percent or more for the Dow nearly assured victories for sitting presidents. Drops of 10 percent or worse got them tossed out.

Voters returned Calvin Coolidge to the White House in 1924, just as the Roaring ’20s started roaring. They booted Herbert Hoover in 1932 while the stock market suffered through a three-year plunge.

The authors of the Socionomics Institute study say everything can be traced back to the prevailing optimism or pessimism. Their organization studies “the social mood.” But how do you read the mood of a whole country?

The authors say that the stock market is the best available gauge of how the country is feeling, “because investors can act swiftly to express their optimism or pessimism.” Bad day? Time to sell. Things looking up? Time to buy.

“An increasingly positive social mood produces a rising stock market as well as votes for the incumbent, and an increasingly negative social mood produces a falling stock market as well as votes against the incumbent,” they write.

To the authors, it’s the mood that determines the election, not the stock market. The stock market is just a reliable gauge of the national temper, an incredibly accurate mood ring.

In recent successful re-election campaigns, the connection appears clear. Ronald Reagan won re-election in 1984 following the Dow’s 41 percent surge and despite an unemployment rate of 7.2 percent. Bill Clinton was awarded a second term after the Dow gained 63 percent in the three years leading up to Election Day.

But there are misfires. James Madison, for instance, won re-election in 1812 despite a 34 percent drop in the market over three years. George H.W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton even though the Dow rose 51 percent over his term in office.

Doug Wead, a presidential historian who served in the elder Bush’s administration, says the stock market theory sounds suspect.

“The stock market isn’t even a good indicator of the economy,” he says. “You can have the stock market going up while the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”

There’s also the danger of oversimplifying _ relying on one number, in this case the Dow’s performance, while ignoring everything from scandals and wars to third-party candidates.

In William Howard Taft’s last three years in office, the Dow lost 12 percent, and Taft lost the 1912 election to Woodrow Wilson. But if Theodore Roosevelt hadn’t split from the Republicans and run under the Progressive Party banner against Taft that year, Taft might have returned to office.

It was a similar story with the first President Bush in 1992. The independent candidate Ross Perot siphoned off votes from both candidates, but historians generally believe more came from Bush’s Republican camp. Clinton won with just 43 percent of the popular vote.

The economy also slipped into a recession during Bush’s second year in office, and as he campaigned for re-election, the unemployment rate hovered well above the dreaded 7.2 percent mark.

Orlando, of Federated Investors, says a change in any single statistic won’t guarantee a president gets re-elected. Analysts should consult a range of figures. One that looks less reassuring for Obama is his approval rating, he says.

No president has been re-elected with a Gallup approval rating below 48 percent approaching Election Day. Obama’s numbers are improving, and the election is more than eight months away, but for now he’s teetering on the edge _ 48 percent.

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Get set for a messy fight for control of Canadian Pacific Railway.

Bill Ackman, the no-holds barred activist investor behind U.S. hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management, has made it no secret that he wants CP

Ryerson University plans to make a major announcement Tuesday about its fundraising efforts for the Maple Leaf Gardens, leading to speculation the school may be about to reveal the title sponsor for the venue.

The school, which is a part-owner of the iconic structure, set a goal of raising $60 million to install badly needed student athletic facilities in part of the former hockey arena.

The $60 million is to be raised in equal portions by a federal government infrastructure grant, a special levy on Ryerson students, and corporate donations from such firm as Gardens