On Monday a bipartisan group of House members will try to revive the Export-Import Bank, a federal government agency that finances exports — which its critics deride as little more than a slush fund for big corporations.

The agency, known as the Ex-Im bank, essentially stopped doing new business on July 1, after House leaders let its charter lapse at the behest of conservative Republicans who attacked it as “corporate welfare.”

But the bank has plenty of friends in Washington, and earlier this month 42 Republicans joined 176 Democrats to sign a discharge petition, a rarely used legislative maneuver designed to force a measure up for a vote.

Supporters in the House appear to have enough votes to re-authorize the bank, although it’s less clear it can pass the Senate.

Created during the Depression, the Ex-Im Bank provides insurance and loan guarantees to overseas buyers of American products. Republican Rep. Billy Long of Missouri argues that it plays, and has long played, an important role in America’s economy:

“It’s been a critical part of our country’s history — making the Pan American Highway a reality, helping to keep airlines flying after September 11th, and weathering the 2008 financial crisis while many other banks were unable to.”

The bank also provides guarantees to U.S. companies doing business overseas to ensure they get paid.

Supporters say without the bank, U.S. exporters are at a disadvantage, because many foreign countries bar them from getting contracts without a financing agency to provide loan guarantees.

A small handful of companies, including General Electric, have already said they will move jobs out of the country to countries that provide financing, as a result of the decision to let the bank’s authorization lapse.

The bank has backing from both labor unions and big business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which lobbied hard for its re-authorization.

But it’s opposed by the small government group the Club for Growth, as well as many of the most conservative Republicans, including Jeb Hensarling of Texas, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

Opponents see closing the bank as a moral issue, calling it a form of crony capitalism that allows the federal government to pick winners and losers.

“If we’re ever going to get rid of all the corporate connectedness and all the corporate welfare, you got to start with the most egregious one and the most obvious one, and that’s the Export-Import Bank,” Republican Jim Jordan of Ohio told NPR in June.

One study by Veronique de Rugy of the libertarian Mercatus Center at George Mason University and Diane Katz of the conservative Heritage Foundation found that the bank “mainly benefits very large exporters.”

Of the top 10 foreign companies that use the bank to finance U.S. goods, five are in the oil and natural gas business, while the rest are airlines buying aircraft from Boeing, the report said.

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Most likely, Congress will — as it always does — find a last-minute way to dodge a debt-ceiling crisis.

It’s easy to get bored with it all. Scores of times over recent decades, lawmakers have taken the country to the brink of financial catastrophe only to swerve away by voting to allow more debt.

Now here we are again. Treasury says it will run out of money to pay bills — in full and on time — as early as Nov. 3. That means Congress will wait until the last minute, vote — and we can all go back to ignoring this weird debt drama until the next time. Right?

Well, what if this year, the House is too cranky and distracted to pull off another late save? Remember that the Republican-led chamber is in the midst of a leadership change, with a vote for House speaker set for Thursday, Oct. 29 — mighty close to Nov. 3.

And don’t forget that several senators are running for their party’s presidential nomination. They may want to make lengthy debt-related speeches on the Senate floor — a time-consuming process that might push votes past Nov. 3.

So what if, amid these political stresses, Congress actually blows the deadline and the country runs out of money? What does that even mean?

This may help you understand what’s happening:

• Debt Ceiling: The term used to describe the limit Congress sets on how much money government may borrow. The current cap is $18.113 trillion.
• Hitting The Ceiling: Unless Congress raises the cap by Nov. 3, Treasury may be left with only incoming taxes and fees to cover expenses, which would not be enough to pay all bills.
• Fixing The Problem: Congress can raise the ceiling, or suspend it or eliminate it entirely.
• Why This Is Happening: The White House and Democrats want to simply raise the ceiling, but many Republicans see the deadline as an opportunity to force deeper spending cuts and other reforms.
• Why It Matters: Having a reputation for always paying its debts allows the U.S. Treasury to borrow at very low interest rates. Investors everywhere count on the United States to be the one safe haven where they can park money and always get paid the principle and interest. It’s not a stretch to say the global financial system is built around U.S. stability.

If the United States were to run out of cash, the injured parties would be too numerous to count. Here’s a short list:

• Social Security and Medicare recipients: Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew told Congress the U.S. makes about 80 million payments a month, “including Social Security and veteran benefits, military salaries, Medicare reimbursements and many others. In the absence of congressional action, Treasury would be unable to satisfy all of these obligations.” Not getting a government check could mean going hungry for millions of Americans.
• Bondholders: If the Treasury were to run out of cash, it may not be able to pay public investors, including foreign governments. That default could trigger bond market chaos that sets off a global financial panic.
• Stockholders: Trouble in the bond market would spill over to stocks. Share prices took a huge hit in August 2011, when a bruising debt-ceiling battle led to a U.S. credit downgrade.
• Homebuyers and other borrowers: If Treasury were to default even briefly, the result could be a lower credit rating. A lower rating potentially could mean higher interest rates, and many consumer loans are pegged to Treasury rates.
• Taxpayers: If Treasury ends up having to pay higher interest rates, then maintaining the huge U.S. debt would become even more expensive for taxpayers.

As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said last month that “if the United States missed a bond payment, it would shake the confidence of the world economy.”

If the House speakership election goes as planned next week, Ryan would be in charge of rallying his troops behind a solution. But his path forward is not clear because Republicans disagree with each other about what to demand in exchange for approving a higher ceiling. They promise action next week.

Democrats sent a letter to Republicans Friday, begging for a “clean” bill to lift the cap. “Raising the debt ceiling will ensure that America pays its bills for expenses already incurred, and does not authorize any new spending,” they wrote.

At a press conference Friday, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Republicans who want to address spending cuts should save their arguments for a separate debate over funding legislation needed to avert a government shutdown on Dec. 11.

“We stand ready to cooperate, to negotiate on the keeping-government-open legislation,” Pelosi said.

While the arguments continue in Washington, on Wall Street, there is no debate. Economists and investors are urging Congress to act. Citi strategist Andrew Hollenhorst summed up the sentiment in his understated note to investors. A failure to solve the problem next week would be “highly imprudent,” he wrote.

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Weeks after hundreds of thousands of RushCard customers were unable to access their money due to what the company called a technical glitch, the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has stepped in to “ensure a comprehensive response” to the situation.

“The CFPB is taking direct action to get to the bottom of this situation that may have harmed thousands of innocent consumers already.” Director Richard Cordray said in a statement Friday. “The CFPB has also engaged in discussions with fellow regulators, including the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Trade Commission, to ensure a comprehensive response that addresses the situation quickly and holds accountable all of the parties involved to make consumers whole.”

While RushCard, a financial company owned by hip hop mogul Russell Simmons, has said nearly all of the problems with its prepaid debit cards are resolved, there are still some customers who say they are having trouble.

Racquel Hudson, 27, of Chicago said she went nearly two weeks without being able to access her money before her account regained full function on Wednesday. She said her husband was still not able to access his account.

Hudson, who works as a care manager assistant for Advocate Medical Group, said she was working hard to make ends meet.

“I’m squeezing the little money I have saved from my last paycheck, but that’s not even enough to pay off my bills. If I pay off my bills I’m gonna be broke,” she said Wednesday. Then what am I gonna do?”

Many of RushCard’s customers are what the finance industry calls “underbanked” or “unbanked,” meaning they do not have enough money to sustain a checking account, as The Atlantic‘s Gillian White explained on All Things Considered:

“They don’t have the necessary credit to keep up a credit line,” White told NPR’s Audie Cornish. “Prepaid cards kind of fill that role where you can have money direct deposited onto it. You can load money yourself, and then you can use it in places where a debit card — in this case, a Visa card — would be accepted.”

Hudson says she is considering taking legal action.

“I’ve put in a complaint in with the FDIC. And the Consumer Financial [Protection Bureau] and I’m to the point where I want to take legal action,” she said. “That’s my next step, trying to find an attorney for a situation like this.”

The CFPB is also considering its next steps. CFPB spokesman David Mayorga said one possibility is a lawsuit.

He declined to comment on whether the fact that many of of RushCard’s customers are poor and likely do not have the resources to pursue legal action on their own would influence the bureau’s decision to pursue punitive action against the company.

Mayorga did say, however, that there is a CFPB proposal under consideration that would ban consumer financial companies from using certain arbitration clauses that protect them from customers’ class-action lawsuits. As it stands, many financial companies, including RushCard, contractually prohibit customers from joining together to sue in groups.

“Consumers should not be asked to sign away their legal rights when they open a bank account or credit card,” Cordray said in an Oct. 7 statement. “Companies are using the arbitration clause as a free pass to sidestep the courts and avoid accountability for wrongdoing. The proposals under consideration would ban arbitration clauses that block group lawsuits so that consumers can take companies to court to seek the relief they deserve.”

The proposal was in the works before this month’s RushCard debacle, and is still under review.

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U.S. officials have dropped insider trading charges against former hedge fund manager Michael Steinberg, after an appeals court ruling struck down convictions in a related case.

Prosecutors also dropped charges against six cooperating witnesses who had pleaded guilty in the same case.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement that the charges against the witnesses “would no longer be in the interest of justice.”

Today’s decision blows a big hole in the government’s high-profile investigation of insider trading on Wall Street.

Steinberg, a top official at SAC Capital, was convicted in 2013 and sentenced to three and a half years in prison.

But last year, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the convictions of hedge fund managers Todd Newman and Anthony Chiasson, ruling that prosecutors had overreached in their case against the men.

Newman and Chiasson traded on the basis of inside information about technology company earnings.

But the court ruled that the insiders who originally passed on the information hadn’t received any personal benefit for doing so.

Such a conviction requires “proof of a meaningfully close personal relationship that generates an exchange that is objective, consequential and represents at least a potential gain of a pecuniary or similarly valuable nature,” the court said.

The court said “the government must also prove that the defendants — in this case, several steps removed from the initial disclosure — knew they were trading on information of this sort.”

After the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the ruling, Bharara said he decided to drop the charges:

“These prosecutions were all undertaken in good faith reliance on what this office and others, including able defense counsel for all those who pled guilty, understood to be the well-settled law before Newman.”

Bharara said the ruling would make it much harder to pursue insider trading cases, and was a “potential bonanza for friends and family of rich people with access to material nonpublic information.”

Steinberg’s attorney, Barry Berke, expressed satisfaction about today’s decision:

“Michael Steinberg did not commit any crime and is an innocent man. We hope that his vindication will receive as much attention as his wrongful prosecution.”

“We are pleased that the ordeal for Mike Steinberg and his family is over,” said Mark Herr, a spokesman for Point72 Asset Management, the company formerly known as SAC.

Roland Riopelle, the attorney for one of the cooperating witnesses, Danny Kuo, said Bharara “chose to do the right thing, even if doing so was not the politically easy thing to do. With this matter behind him, Mr. Kuo looks forward to getting on with the rest of his life.”

The other witnesses were Spyridon Adondakis, Sandeep Goyal, Jon Horvath, Hyung Lim and Jesse Tortora.

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Now, that’s a lousy day in the market.

Valeant Pharmaceuticals, already under fire for its drug-pricing policies, was accused on Wednesday of creating phantom sales to falsely inflate revenues.

The allegations were made by Citron Research, a short-selling firm, in a report entitled, “Could this be the Pharmaceutical Enron?”

Short-sellers such as Citron make bets that a company’s stock will fall and they benefit when the price goes down, so their opinions can often be viewed with skepticism.

Nevertheless, the report sent Valeant’s stock, a favorite of hedge funds, plummeting by as much as 41 percent, eliminating as much as $20 billion from its market value. The stock is now down about 54 percent from its August high.

Multi-billionaire investor Bill Ackman of Pershing Square Capital Management was said to have lost as much as $2 billion on the stock, although with the price now so low, Ackman also told CNBC he is loading up on new shares.

Valeant, based in Quebec, is reportedly under investigation by federal prosecutors, who are seeking information about its pricing and distribution policies. The company has purchased the rights to sell two heart drugs, Nitopress and Isuprel, and raised their prices by 212 and 525 percent, respectively.

Such practices have been especially controversial lately after Turing Pharmaceuticals bought the right to sell Duraprim and then raised its price by 5,000 percent. After that huge increase was widely denounced as price-gouging, Turing agreed to lower the price.

Valeant’s troubles mounted Wednesday after the release of Citron’s report, which said the company used its relationship with specialty pharmaceutical companies such as Philidor to create phantom sales that made revenue look higher than it was.

Valeant issued a statement calling the report erroneous and denying any attempt to inflate revenue.

“There is no sales benefit from any inventory held at these specialty pharmacies,” Valeant said, in the statement.

Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that Valeant and other drug companies were using mail-order specialty firms to circumvent efforts by insurance companies to switch patients to cheaper, generic versions of their drugs.

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If you’ve consumed coconut oil or coconut meat lately, there’s a reasonable chance it was imported from Thailand. And if it was, there’s an even better chance the farmer who grew that coconut had a monkey fetch it from a tall tree.

Thailand has been raising and training pigtailed macaques to pick coconuts for around 400 years. Coconut farmers in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, India and other countries in the region sometimes rely on monkeys, too.

Why monkeys? Turns out a male monkey can collect an average of 1,600 coconuts per day and a female can get 600, while a human can only collect around 80 per day. It’s also safer for a scampering, height-savvy monkey to pluck and drop the fruit from the trees — up to 80 feet tall — than a human, according to the National Primate Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

We weren’t aware that monkeys were key to the Asian coconut industry — until Animal Place, a farm sanctuary in Grass Valley, Calif., contacted us in early October claiming that monkeys are being “exploited” on coconut plantations there. “Animal-aware people are increasingly avoiding coconut products that come from monkey slavery,” the group, which advocates a vegan diet, said.

While Animal Place says it has not actually visited any coconut plantations allegedly abusing monkeys, Marji Beach, the group’s education director, tells The Salt that YouTube videos are evidence enough that the animals are cruelly shackled and forced to work.

“What I find most distressing is that they take them from wild, keep them tethered and keep them that way their whole life,” says Beach. “Monkeys should stay in the wild.”

After making the monkey-coconut discovery on YouTube, Beach asked several companies that sell coconut oil or other products containing coconut in the U.S. if their suppliers used monkeys. Beach says all of the companies she contacted replied that they do not.

Monkey trainers in Thailand tell The Salt they find that hard to believe.

“It would be difficult to find a coconut product made in Thailand that wasn’t picked by a monkey,” Arjen Schroevers tells The Salt by email. Monkeys pick 99 percent of the Thai coconuts sold for their oil and flesh, he says.

Schroevers runs the Monkey Training School in Surat Thani, Thailand, a Buddhist-inspired school founded 50 years ago to teach monkeys how to pick coconuts without the use of force or violence. He says Animal Place has it all wrong when it comes to how most monkeys that work on coconut farms are treated.

“It is always relaxed, no shouting, no punishing,” he says. “Every few trees the monkey hugs his owner, who then checks the monkey for red ants (who live in the trees) and the monkey gets a massage. Outside working hours the monkeys are kept as a pet (only for the family owners, to strangers they are not friendly).”

And as for the tethering, Schroevers says it serves a variety of purposes including guiding the monkeys up the tree and preventing them from escaping.

What’s more, says Schroevers, the alternative would be a human poking a long pole with a knife up into the tree to cut the coconuts. “Because the trees are so high, you must stand straight under the coconuts you want to collect,” he says. “They drop 6-12 at a time. Very dangerous!” (He adds that coconuts kill around 600 people per year worldwide.)

Of course, the working monkeys of Thailand have many similarly industrious counterparts in the animal world. Think oxen plowing fields, sheepdogs herding livestock, rottweilers guarding houses or beagles sniffing for drugs in airports. (Archaeologists say baboons once picked tree nuts in ancient Egypt.)

Others familiar with the coconut-picking monkeys of Thailand are also skeptical of the allegations of abuse. Leslie Sponsel is a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Hawaii who, with his wife, Dr. Poranee Natadecha-Sponsel, studied monkey-human relationships in Thailand and published papers on the topic.

“During our time in southern Thailand, we never observed or heard of cruelty or abuse of the monkeys,” Sponsel says. “Indeed, the monkeys are very similar to family pets, and for some households, even like family members to some degree. Young ones are trained, and they are kept on a chain tethered to the handler or to a shelter when not working. They are fed, watered, bathed, groomed and otherwise cared for. They often ride to the coconut palm plantation on the back of a motor bike or in a cart driven by the handler.

“That is not to say that there is never any cruelty or mistreatment,” Sponsel adds. But overall, he says he respects “the poor farmers and others who are just trying to survive and prosper in support of their families.”

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

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Kent Smetters is an economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. To educate people about how to save and invest more successfully he hosts a radio show, “Your Money,” on Sirius XM which, along with his website KentOnMoney.com, he does pro bono. As part of NPR’s “Your Money and Your Life” series, we asked Smetters for tips on finding a financial adviser:

Finding a good adviser involves two key steps:

First, only choose a “fee-only adviser.” Don’t be fooled by the expression “fee based” — that’s a wolf in a sheep’s clothing. The word “only” is critical. By law, a “fee-only” adviser must place your interests first and not accept hidden commissions from mutual funds, insurance companies, or anyone else. Such commissions create incentives for advisers to steer you into higher-cost investments that can radically reduce your account balances over time. If you find a fee-only adviser who charges by the hour, a reasonable fee is $250-$400 per hour. You might need just a few hours so this is often the best way to go. Other fee-only advisers take a percentage of your total assets that you’re investing. In that case, a reasonable annual fee is between 0.25 percent (for $1 million or more) and 0.75 percent (if less). But if you pay as a percentage of your assets, then do the following: convert the percentage paid to actual dollars; discuss openly how much work they are doing; and, if you think the amount being paid is unreasonable, shop around for other quotes.

Second, you want an adviser who believes in “low-cost passive-indexed diversification.” That’s fancy language but important. All it means is that your adviser is using low-cost investments (often index funds) while not trying to “beat the market.” Keeping costs low is critical for creating wealth over time. And by buying an index of stocks, say the S&P 500, you can very cheaply just “ride the market” up over time. The evidence is very clear that even skilled investment managers who try to “beat the market” generally can’t do it. In other words, paying people to pick stocks for you usually means you pay higher fees and make less money.

As far as fees, the fees in this type of a diversified investment portfolio should be no more than 0.15 percent, not including the advisory fees noted above. In other words, the total cost of managing your money should be less than 1.0 percent if you are using an adviser, and around 0.15 percent if you go at it alone.

For small business owners offering a retirement plan like a 401(k), it is highly likely that you and your employees are paying way too much for it. Even a small 401(k) with less than $5 million should have a “total all-in fee” (or “total expense ratio”) of less than 0.75 percent. Larger plans should have even smaller expense ratios. Shop around. I recommend the following firms: Vanguard, Ubiquity and Employee Fiduciary. Ask for the simplest 401(k) program without too many bells and whistles.

If you are an individual investor, the chances are even greater that you are overpaying. To find a fee-only adviser, I generally recommend the websites provided by NAPFA and the Garrett Planning Network. However, even some fee-only advisers are too expensive and not using low-cost passive indexing. So, I screen fee-only advisers that I really like on my website. It has a smaller list but it is quickly growing. If you find an adviser who is not on my list, tell them to contact me via the website and I’ll add them to my list of advisers to screen.

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The U.S. government is backing away from Arctic offshore oil and gas drilling on two fronts.

On Friday, the Department of the Interior announced the cancellation of two potential lease sales off the Alaskan coast in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement also denied lease extension requests from two companies, Shell and Statoil, that were exploring the seas for fossil fuels.

The decisions to nix the lease sales, which the statement attributed to “current market conditions and low industry interest,” follows Shell’s announcement that it will stop exploration in the Chukchi Sea for “the foreseeable future.”

“In light of Shell’s announcement, the amount of acreage already under lease and current market conditions, it does not make sense to prepare for lease sales in the Arctic in the next year and a half,” said Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell.

Lois Epstein, an engineer for the environmental group The Wilderness Society, characterized the government’s decision as reasonable, according to a statement.

“Because of Shell’s failure to find significant oil in the Chukchi Sea, new Arctic Ocean lease sales — which require extensive government preparation and costs — would likely be unsuccessful,” Epstein said.

In explaining why Shell and Statoil were not given permission to retain their leases beyond 10 years, the Interior Department statement said that the companies “did not demonstrate a reasonable schedule of work for exploration and development.”

Epstein praised the move, saying, “We applaud Interior’s decision not to continue discussing extensions of their existing leases with Shell and other Arctic Ocean leaseholders.”

The existing leases in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas will expire in 2017 and 2020, respectively.

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