The biggest news for the Republican presidential-nomination race last week wasn’t the outcome of the Iowa caucuses but the recess appointment of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  Unless you think Rick Santorum can scale up in record time to run a national campaign, the Iowa results just confirmed what we already knew: Mitt Romney is likely to face President Barack Obama in November. The Cordray appointment indicates that the president sees things the same way, and has decided to focus the fight on one of Romney’s vulnerabilities: his views on the financial sector.

The Wall Street Journal examined 77 businesses Mitt Romney invested in while running Bain Capital from its 1984 start until early 1999, to see how they fared during Bain's involvement and shortly afterward. "Among the findings: 22% either filed for bankruptcy reorganization or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year after Bain first invested, sometimes with substantial job losses. An additional 8% ran into so much trouble that all of the money Bain invested was lost. Another finding was that Bain produced stellar returns for its investors -- yet the bulk of these came from just a small number of its investments. Ten deals produced more than 70% of the dollar gains."

All eyes are on consumers and whether they can spend enough to boost economic growth this year.They are going to need jobs to do it. The economy added 200,000 jobs in December, which was better than expected, and the jobless rate fell to 8.5 percent, the Labor Department reported Friday.