Mid-day Update

PODCAST: Fixing infrastructure and American jobs

David Brancaccio May 14, 2014
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Mid-day Update

PODCAST: Fixing infrastructure and American jobs

David Brancaccio May 14, 2014
HTML EMBED:
COPY

President Obama heads to New York’s Tappan Zee bridge today. The crumbling, sixty year old span across the Hudson River will be the backdrop for a speech on America’s infrastructure. Barring action from Congress, a federal fund for road, bridge and transit construction and repair is expected to run dry in August, something the adminstration argues could cost up to 700,000 jobs. Marketplace’s Krissy Clark breaks down that number.

Meanwhile, Cisco Systems is viewed as a sort of barometer for the tech industry, and when it announces its profits on Wednesday, Silicon Valley will be paying attention to the company’s latest push into the “Internet of Things,” aiming to link cars, machines, devices and everything in between.

And, we now know once-disgraced mortgage giant Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have made enough money to hand more than $10 billion back to the U.S. Treasury for last quarter.  That’s where the US Treasury says it has to go, given the taxpayer bailout five years ago. But with all things Fannie and Freddit, this is controversial. Marketplace regular Alan Sloan is senior editor at large at Fortune Magazine and joined us to discuss.

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