President Obama in his first State of the Union address to the US Congress on Wednesday night, focused on jobs and reducing the national deficit, dedicating almost two-thirds of his speech to economic issues, at a time of political ferment in Washington DC, a week following the dramatic loss of the late Edward Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts. Earlier on Wednesday, on the eve of a US Senate vote on Ben Bernanke’s nomination for a second term as Federal Reserve chairman, the central bank’s rate setting committee kept short-term interest rates near zero and provided a more optimistic assessment on the economy, than it had in December.
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