Randomly Noted

General Electric reported earlier today that its earnings and sales were a little softer than everyone expected them to be although orders for new equipment and services grew in the third-quarter – a sign business is picking up.

But one of the clear challenged that remains for GE is its real estate portfolio in its GE Capital unit. The company reported today that its real estate business lost $405 million. Now, that’s better than the $538 million loss in the year-ago quarter, but it shows that the weight of bad loans continues to drag down GE Capital.

The company also noted that it has $1.4 billion in non-performing loans, so, more losses are likely. It wrote off $222 million of losses from that real estate loan portfolio.

To no one’s surprise, The U.S. Treasury passed today on the opportunity to brand China a manipulator of its currency.

That was done as a way to avoid for now an artificial exercise imposed by law.

More telling, in the real world of hardball negotiations, the broad recent decline in the U.S. dollar’s value against many currencies could well give the U.S. less heft as it tries to jawbone Chinese leadership into submission on the yuan.

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In the debate about how much of the U.S. unemployment problem is due to factors beyond the flat economy, the chairman of the Federal Reserve has weighed in: not enough to keep the Fed still.

In his much-anticipated speech this morning in which Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke signalled another round of quantitative easing is coming soon, he also noted the obscure issue of how much of the unemployment rate is due to structural factors.

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