Need to know:
Ron Paul plans to take another whack at the Fed today.

The federal committee he chairs is scheduled to consider his Federal Reserve Board Abolition Act and several other bills that aim to alter the course of the US central bank.

The Fed so far has been able to heartily withstand Paul’s attempts to topple it, but Paul has been able to get the Fed’s books audited and gotten Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to reveal that he does his own grocery shopping.

Bernanke meanwhile may remain a lonesome dove on the Fed board a while longer. President Barack Obama’s latest nominees to join Bernanke on the board will have to face so many hurdles to get approved that the Senate may just give up on them, Reuters reported.

Want to know:
The US may actually have made money in April for the first time in a very long time.

We’ll have have to wait until the official numbers come out on Thursday. But for now, the Congressional Budget Office is expecting the government last month generated its first surplus is nearly four years.

A profit wouldn’t exactly mean the US has turned a big economic corner, though. Much of April’s gains are attributed to timing and the US still isn’t yet expected to break its streak of $1 trillion annual deficits.

Dull but important:
Spain has its own too big to fail problem. Spain plans to spend billions of euros to bail out its third largest bank, Financial Times reported.

Bankia is struggling under the weight of bad real estate loans as Spain battles its second recession in three years. The bank could need up to $13 billion to weather the euro zone crisis, but it’s not clear how the government might finance a bailout, Reuters said.

Bankia, which used to be seven smaller banks until a series of a mergers a few years ago, poses the biggest risk to the Spanish banking sector, according to the IMF.

Meanwhile newly elected leaders in Greek parliament still are struggling to form a ruling coalition and talk that Greece could be forced out of the euro zone is growing. 

Just because:
The euro zone may have problems, but India's could be worse, according to one economist.  

While US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is trying to help American retailers like Wal-Mart gain new customers in India, American economist Tyler Cowen is worrying about just how much the country’s economy has slowed down.

Even though India’s economy still is growing faster than the US economy, its having a disproportionately negative effect on the poor, he wrote in The New York Times.

If India's economy doesn't pick of steam, another generation of millions of Indians may fail to rise out of extreme poverty, according to Cowen. 

Strange but true:
Mark Zuckerberg won't wear a suit for Wall Street, not even for Facebook’s big IPO.

Need to know:
European voters have had enough of government budget cutbacks. 

Voters in France and Greece ousted leaders pushing government spending cuts and instead picked candidates who are against the austerity measures being criticized for holding back a European recovery.

Francois Hollande won the French presidency from Nicolas Sarkozy while Greece's dominant political parties failed to win enough votes in Sunday's election to form a ruling coalition.

Greek voters embrace of anti-bailout parliamentary candidates is increasing worries that Greece won't commit to the budget cuts it needs to make to stay in the euro zone.

The elections were essentially referendums on current European economic policy and their outcomes could be the best thing for the euro zone, Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote in The New York Times. "It’s far from clear how soon the votes will lead to changes in actual policy, but time is clearly running out for the strategy of recovery through austerity — and that’s a good thing," Krugman wrote

Want to know:
Romania already is planning to ease up on at least one of the austerity measures it implemented in 2010.

Romania has convinced the International Monetary Fund to allow it to begin raising public sector wages and run a higher budget deficit than a bailout deal it made with the IMF would dictate, Reuters reported.

Romania is the European Union’s second poorest member. It cut public sector wages by 25 percent, and things haven’t gone well.

Romanians have been staging violent protests against austerity measures like spending cuts and tax hikes, and the Romanian government has already collapsed twice this year.

Dull but important:
Australia’s strong dollar may be getting in the way of its growth.

Australia’s central bank cut its growth forecast, saying a strong Australian dollar was hurting the country’s exports. The value of Australia’s dollar has risen an estimated 70 percent since 2008, making its exports far more expensive to the rest of the world.

It's a particularly big problem for Australia because it is the world’s largest exporter of iron ore and coal.

Just because:
Warren Buffett held his annual shareholder meeting in Omaha, Neb., this weekend where he worked hard to reassure investors that both he and his Berkshire Hathaway were going to be ok.

Buffett revealed Berkshire Hathaway has got $20 billion or so to throw around for a good investment and said that he might want to buy a few more newspapers. He also told investors not to focus on share prices too much because the stock market sometimes acts like a “psychotic drunk,” the Berkshire Hathaway-owned Omaha World-Herald said.

Berkshire Hathaway stock has been underperforming the market for the past few years but that hasn't stopped thousands of investors from making an annual trip to Omaha. 

Shareholders are allowed four passes to the meeting, which draws thousands has become something of a Woodstock capitalists. In case you’re curious, buying one share of Berkshire Hathaway stock to get in will set you back about $122,000.

Strange but true:
Attention wealthy travelers, you can now have a drink with Sir Richard Branson on his Virgin Atlantic airlines — at least until he melts.

BOSTON — For nearly a year now, the eat-your-own Republican primary has made for amusing political drama.

The GOP has seemingly revived the tradition of local theatre with an epic string of debates featuring wing-nuts like Herman Cain, Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann.

Key take away message: The right has pitched a very big tent. Sarah Palin is by no means alone among its eccentrics.

But now that Republicans have selected a presidential candidate, the shenanigans are behind us, right?

From the party of Reagan, Bush and Bush we can expect a disciplined, focused and united effort to defeat President Barack Obama in November, right?

Well, may not.

Today, Wall Street Journal columnist and deputy editorial page editor Brett Stephens weighs in one of the party's brightest intellectual stars, former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.

Rice is currently favored as Mitt Romney's vice presidential nomination, with an approval rating of 80 percent among GOP voters. Her closest rival is Rick Santorum, a political non-starter, having spent the primaries dumping on Romney, his would-be boss.

Although the WSJ editorial page tilts Republican, Stephens doesn't share voters' favorable view of Rice.

And that's an understatement.

Here's Stephen's nut:

"[Rice] was on the wrong side of some of the administration's biggest internal policy fights. She had a tendency to flip-flop when it came to the president's core priorities and her political misjudgment more than once cost Mr. Bush dearly. She was a muddler of differences at the national security council. Her tenure at State was notable mainly for the degree to which the bureaucracy ran her, not the other way around."

Ouch. That's no ringing endorsement.

Objectively speaking, Rice is an asset in the way that "9-9-9" or "End the Fed" isn't.

Regardless of whether you agree with her, she is a widely respected expert on foreign policy, with experience throughout the highly charged Bush presidency. She is eloquent and worldly, a longtime professor at Stanford. In a party that has struggled with gravitas, she certainly knows what newspapers she reads. To convince the electorate that she is qualified, she won't need to claim that Russia is visible from her bedroom window.

Credentials aside, she would also strengthen the already-tattered Republican ticket.

Stephens concedes this point: