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Bill Battle peers through the window of a pickup truck at his catfish farm, Pride of the Pond, near Tunica, Miss. The land is pancake-flat, broken up by massive ponds, some holding up to 100,000 pounds of catfish.

Cormorants fly low over the ponds, keeping an eye out for whiskered, smooth-skinned fish. Battle keeps a shotgun in the front seat; business is hard enough without the birds cutting into his profit.

Battle has been catfish farming for more than three decades. Catfish has always been popular in the South, but its popularity took off throughout the country in the 1980s. Battle says they could hardly build ponds fast enough to keep up with the demand.

But he's watched with alarm over the past decade as Vietnam has flooded the U.S. market with its own, cheaper catfish, forcing him to cut back on production. "At one time, I was 3,000 acres. Now I'm basically about 1,200 acres of water," he says.

Ben Pentecost, president of the Catfish Farmers of America, says Battle is not alone — the Vietnamese imports have affected the whole domestic market. "Our industry peaked at 660 million pounds live weight fish. And this last year I think we did 300 million pounds," he says.

Vietnamese imports now make up 60 percent of the U.S. catfish market, which has helped drive more than half of the American catfish farms out of business, says Pentecost.

And U.S. catfish farmers have serious food safety concerns about the Vietnamese fish, which they say are raised with antibiotics in polluted water, Pentecost says.

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Seven months after his was nominated, the U.S. Senate this week confirmed former Rep. Mel Watt, D-N.C., to head the agency that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant companies that control much of the mortgage market.

The vote occurred after Democrats changed the rules on filibusters — now the Senate can confirm presidential nominees with a simple majority.

For people who watch the U.S. housing market, Watt's confirmation is a very big deal that could mean easier credit.

Most Americans probably don't realize that these two hugely important companies, Fannie and Freddie, are actually controlled by a bureaucrat in a little office in Washington.

That one bureaucrat has a lot of influence when it comes to the housing market.

The Power Of The Job

Watt will now be heading up the FHFA. Most Americans probably couldn't tell you what that acronym stands for. It's the Federal Housing Finance Agency. It controls Fannie and Freddie. And that means it controls a lot.

More than 90 percent of all new mortgages in the United States flow through Fannie and Freddie (and the Federal Housing Administration). So these companies are vital. They control that massive river of money flowing into mortgages.

They get to decide who qualifies to buy a house or refinance and who doesn't.

They oversee hundreds of billions of dollars in mortgage investments.

Every major decision Fannie and Freddie make has to be approved by the head of the FHFA — soon to be Watt. Fannie and Freddie used to be big quasi-private companies with chief executive officers and shareholders who held stock in the companies. But then the housing market collapsed, and Fannie and Freddie needed a $200 billion bailout. Congress gave them punishing terms under the bailout that made the companies wards of the state. The government essentially took them over and their CEOs are controlled by the FHFA chief.

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Ireland was one of the countries hardest hit by Europe's debt crisis. On Sunday, it passed a big milestone when the nation became the first country to formally exit the bailout program funded by the International Monetary Fund and the European Union.

After three years of the bailout program, it isn't hard to find signs of improvement in Ireland and of an economy coming back from the dead.

"Don't get me wrong, it's been bad in a lot of ways, but there's a silver lining in every cloud," says Conor Mulhall, a 41-year-old father of three.

Mulhall used to be in construction management. After the collapse of the Irish economy, he moved to England. But recently, he moved back to Ireland to take a job managing another business.

"It brings you to new stages in your life," Mulhall says. "I'm now involved in the organic food business, so I never would have been if the construction thing had kept going, and there's a lot of people like me."

Mulhall is working at a food fair near Dublin's financial district.

These days, people like him are beginning to find work again. Ireland's unemployment rate has fallen from more than 15 percent to 12.5 percent. The economy is growing again, albeit slowly.

"We're still below where we were at the top of our inflated boom, so we need 10 years of solid growth, but we'll do it year by year," says Michael Noonan, Ireland's finance minister.

Noonan says that big foreign companies, including a lot of U.S. tech firms like Google, are once again investing in Ireland. The government can also borrow at a rate not much higher than countries like England and Belgium. Tourism and agriculture are rebounding as well.

Noonan says the exit from the European bailout program is one more step forward. The program forced the country to undergo steep budget cuts and tax increases in exchange for loans.

"Leaving the program means we control our own affairs," he says. "And an Irish government elected by the Irish people can make all future decisions concerning our country."

But there's little joy in Ireland over the exit, perhaps because the country still has a long way to go. The economic crisis was caused by a property bubble that popped in 2008, and the severe budget cuts that followed left the government with few resources to help.

"If you walk around the main streets of our cities, there are people sleeping in the streets because the homeless shelters are all crowded," says Robin Hanan, who directs the Irish branch of the European Anti-Poverty Network. "A lot of people lost their jobs and their houses."

Even though things are getting better, economist Colm McCarthy of University College Dublin says the recovery is tentative.

"It's very fragile and the economy is very dependent on external demand; it's a very small country," McCarthy says. "It exports a lot of what's produced here and a lot of what's consumed is imported."

McCarthy says Ireland's fate is very much up to its export markets — mainly England, the United States and continental Europe — and none of them are thriving. There are other problems as well.

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Lately, it seems as if news about Sriracha has been as ubiquitous as the beloved hot sauce itself.

First, there was the panic over a potential shortage, after a judge ordered the California factory where Sriracha is made to partially shut down, as our friends on the Two-Way blog have reported.

Now, this red hot culinary phenomenon is starring in its own documentary.

Released this week, Sriracha is a 33-minute movie from filmmaker Griffin Hammond that traces the origins of the incredibly popular condiment, a pureed blend of garlic, red jalapenos, sugar, salt and vinegar that has addicted many a palate.

"Sriracha" documentary trailer from Griffin Hammond on Vimeo.