President Barack Obama met with Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Washington today to hash out tensions related to the declining value of the Japanese yen.  The Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) has previously expressed concern regarding Japan’s undervalued currency and, in May 2012, joined a broad cross-section of U.S. manufacturers and industrial groups in pressing the Obama Administration to include rules governing currency manipulation as a key point of future trade agreements. 

On Wednesday, President Obama unveiled some specifics for his plan to make America a “magnet for jobs.”  The president’s plan aligns very closely with the Alliance for American Manufacturing's (AAM) ‘Blueprint for Manufacturing.’  Specifically, creating a national infrastructure bank and rebuilding America's major bridges and roads can create “thousands of good American jobs that cannot be outsourced.”

A report released Tuesday by an American computer security firm suggests that major, recent cyberattacks against the United States are the work of a Chinese military unit.  The report says that the attacks -- aiming at everything from defense contractors to Coca-Cola to companies that manage municipal power grids -- can be traced to a single neighborhood of Shanghai and a single office building run by Unit 63198, an arm of the PLA. And while Mandiant refrains from saying with absolute certainty that the Chinese military is at the trail's end of the amassed evidence, it's pretty confident when making that assumption.