West Coast Ports On A Roll -- WSJ -- April 14, 2016; Money Laundering

The Wall Street Journal is reporting:

Cargo volumes at the nation’s West Coast ports appear to be making a comeback from a lackluster year in 2015, reporting gains in the first quarter of 2016 and a hopeful improvement on the export side.

At the nation’s largest container port, the Port of Los Angeles, loaded export containers increased 7.6% to 432,092 20-foot equivalent units, a standard measure for container cargo, during the first three months of the year. Loaded import containers were up 8.8% to 1,027,184 TEUs. Empty containers on the export side, which ballooned in 2015, continued the trend, rising 19.4% for January through March in Los Angeles.

Year over year, the month of March saw steep declines compared with March 2015—the result of an unusual surge in container traffic immediately after the West Coast dockworkers’ union and port employers agreed to contract terms in late February of that year after months of protracted negotiations and delays at the ports.

January and February of 2015 were uncommonly slow as the negotiations dragged on, but in the first two months of 2016 much of that traffic recovered.

Another "money laundering" story. PJ Media is reporting:

The Treasury Department is dragging its feet on releasing its findings from an investigation into fraud allegations by solar companies that received cash grants from the government to invest in solar power as part of the president's stimulus bill.

The probe centers on companies and individuals that inflated the value of their investments in order to receive larger grants from the government. Investigators believe the amount of fraud exceeds $1.3 billion -- approximately 2 1/2 times the amount of taxpayer money lost in the Solyndra scandal.

The Treasury Department was supposed to turn over a report on its findings in June of 2015 but has so far failed to inform Congress of the extent of the fraud.

The company? The man? The scam?

In November, Republicans specifically called out SolarCity, a company chaired by billionaire Elon Musk, for being investigated by Treasury and Justice Department officials over allegedly abusing solar subsidies. SolarCity is being investigated for “possible misrepresentations concerned the fair market value of the solar energy systems,” according to an October Securities and Exchange Commission filing.