by Laura Conaway

The Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee starts a two-day meeting today. Investors are watching for any sign of whether the Fed intends to raise interest rates from near zero.

Commercial lender CIT predicts a loss of more than $1.5 billion for the second quarter of 2009, but says its bondholders aren't pushing for bankruptcy.

The Obama administration awarded $20 million in stimulus funding for a program to compress carbon for storage instead of releasing it into the atmosphere. The Washington Post reports that Big Coal is betting its future on just this kind of carbon capture.

Calculated Risk tracks auto sales and unemployment and the New York Times finds your next job, in China.

Among the numbers we'll be seeing this week is the nonfarm productivity report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Due out today, the report gives a sense of how occupied workers have been lately. Economists expect a jump of more than five percent, which is a big deal because the length of the average workweek has been dragging around in record-low territory for a couple of months now. The recent round of corporate earnings reports showed many companies generating profits by laying off workers — if the remaining workers are growing busier, that offers hope that employers will tiptoe back toward hiring.