Holy shit! Look what the sweaty folds of the internet coughed up today—conservatives in Colonial wigs and tracksuits rapping about America:

Bravo, internet. I am speechless.

What was discovered when Payscale examined the CEO-to-worker pay ratios in Fortune 50 corporations? UnitedHealth Group looks like Nigeria: 1737 to 1; and Microsoft looks like Sweden: 13 to 1.

WSJ:

Government officials have finalized an agreement worth as much as $26 billion with five major banks, capping a yearlong push to settle federal and state probes of alleged foreclosure abuses by lenders.

The deal represents the largest government-industry settlement since a multistate deal with the tobacco industry in 1998.

Naked Capitalism lists twelve reasons why this deal sucks. Here are four of them:

1. We’ve now set a price for forgeries and fabricating documents. It’s $2000 per loan. This is a rounding error compared to the chain of title problem these systematic practices were designed to circumvent. The cost is also trivial in comparison to the average loan, which is roughly $180k, so the settlement represents about 1% of loan balances. It is less than the price of the title insurance that banks failed to get when they transferred the loans to the trust. It is a fraction of the cost of the legal expenses when foreclosures are challenged. It’s a great deal for the banks because no one is at any of the servicers going to jail for forgery and the banks have set the upper bound of the cost of riding roughshod over 300 years of real estate law.

2. That $26 billion is actually $5 billion of bank money and the rest is your money. The mortgage principal writedowns are guaranteed to come almost entirely from securitized loans, which means from investors, which in turn means taxpayers via Fannie and Freddie, pension funds, insurers, and 401 (k)s. Refis of performing loans also reduce income to those very same investors.

3. That $5 billion divided among the big banks wouldn’t even represent a significant quarterly hit. Freddie and Fannie putbacks to the major banks have been running at that level each quarter.

4. That $20 billion actually makes bank second liens sounder, so this deal is a stealth bailout that strengthens bank balance sheets at the expense of the broader public.

WSJ:

WASHINGTON—The U.S. labor market grew in January at its most robust pace since last spring, a sign that the economy's momentum carried into the new year.

Nonfarm payrolls rose by 243,000 last month, the Labor Department said Friday, marking the biggest gain since April. The jobless rate fell by two-tenths of a point to 8.3%, the lowest it has been since February 2009.

How capital judges a global city...

Shanghai has the cheapest Big Macs, Oslo the most expensive. iPhones are cheapest in San Francisco and cost the most in São Paolo, while iPads are cheapest in Bangkok and most expensive in Buenos Aires.

CNNMoney:

There's no doubt that Apple is doing far better than the U.S. economy as a whole. But that doesn't mean Steve Jobs had a better jobs record than Barack Obama.

Last night in the Republican's response to the president's State of the Union address, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels proclaimed that Apple has created more jobs than President Obama's job creation program did.

"The late Steve Jobs — what a fitting name he had — created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the President borrowed and blew," Daniels said.

The only problem with that nice play on the Apple founder's name is that Daniels' math just doesn't add up, no matter how successful and valuable Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) has become.
Not even close.

CNN:

Oh, how things have changed. Americans are now within mere percentage points of being a majority single nation: Only 51% of adults today are married, according to census data. And 28% of all households now consist of just one person — the highest level in U.S. history. That second statistic may appear less dramatic than the first, but it's actually changing much faster: The percentage of Americans living by themselves has doubled since 1960.
The extraordinary rise of living alone is among the greatest social changes since the baby boom. Until recently, no culture in human history had sustained large numbers of people in places of their own. Today more than 40% of households have just one occupant in cities such as Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Denver, St. Louis, and Seattle. In Manhattan, nearly 50% of households consist of a single occupant, a number that seems impossibly high until you discover that the rate is similar in London and Paris, and even higher — a staggering 60% — in Stockholm.

More on this exciting opportunity here.

The Economist:

Mr Gingrich rejoined: "First of all, Juan, more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in history." This incredibly misleading claim sent the crowd into an ecstasy of delight. "I know among the politically correct you're not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable", Mr Gingrich added to the warm applause of those in attendance brave enough to face the truth.

Of course, Barack Obama has put no one on food stamps. Population growth together with the most severe recession since the advent of the modern American welfare state, which was in full swing when Mr Obama came into office, conspired to make a record number eligible for government food assistance.

The Economist sometimes says the right thing...

A thought experiment: On Twin Earth, does anyone call President John McCain the "food-stamp president"? Is it "politically incorrect" there to call him that? Or is it just so tactically weird to pin that label on a white Republican who inherited a huge recession that the idea simply never occurred to anyone? If, back in our world, it's not "politically correct" and not tactically weird to pin that label on a black Democrat who inherited a huge recession, then why not?

What's your economic worry?

Gallup shows that there’s a direct correlation between household income and concern about the deficit. A recent survey found that the national debt/deficit was the most frequently listed “economic worry” of those earning $75,000 or more, at 21 percent. By contrast, only 8 percent of Americans earning $30,000 or less listed the national debt as their biggest economic concern.

WaPo:

Though the recession has thinned the ranks of other generations in the workforce, more people older than 55 are employed than ever before, according to the latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The reasons for the surge of older workers are complex, experts said, but one of the primary economic forces behind it is the growing fear among older Americans that they lack the means to support their retirement needs.

The phenomenon is closely linked to the broad shift in the United States that began in the ’80s away from reliance on company pensions toward the adoption of 401(k) plans and other personal savings.

Then there's this: A recession for whites; a depression is for the rest:

As the economy slowly improved last year, the unemployment rate fell for both whites and Latinos.
But at the end of the year the black unemployment rate was 15.8%, exactly where it started out 2011, according to the government's December jobs report released Friday. That's a sharp contrast to the white unemployment rate, which fell to 7.5% last month

Nothing that shows comprehension of the coming collapse, according to transcripts obtained by the New York Times:

Instead they continued to tell one another throughout 2006 that the greatest danger was inflation—the possibility that the economy would grow too fast.

“We think the fundamentals of the expansion going forward still look good,” Timothy F. Geithner, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, told his colleagues when they gathered in Washington in December 2006.

As we now know, as the transcripts prove, and as the Times states: "Some of the nation’s pre-eminent economic minds did not fully understand the basic mechanics of the economy that they were charged with shepherding."

"Don't take this personally, it's just business."

Reuters reports that, according to one anti-crime group, the Mafia is now Italy’s largest “bank,” lending out some $179 billion each year, more than any other financial institution in the country...

The Reuters story says organized crime accounts for about 7 percent of Italy’s GDP. An earlier story from 2008 reported that the ’Ndrangheta, the country’s largest crime group, makes up a stunning 3 percent of the GDP all by itself.

WSJ:

In a letter dated Jan. 9 to the Juice Products Association, an industry group, the FDA said a juice company reported "low levels" of carbendazim, a fungicide, in its and its competitors products

The FDA said the fungicide was used on the 2011 orange crop in Brazil, the world's largest grower of oranges and the biggest producer of orange juice.

Florida oranges produce about three-quarters of U.S. orange-juice concentrate supplies, and imports cover the rest. About 75% of those imports come from Brazil.

Are you sick of words, words, words always junking up your computer screen? Do you consider yourself more of a "pie person" than a "numbers person"? Are you ready for a simple, easy-to-digest breakdown of the Washington State budget crisis?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, then I have a deal for you!

The Economic Opportunity Institute, a local nonprofit think tank, has released a helpful, four-page breakdown (Shamwow!pdf) of Washington's 2011-13 General Fund budget, featuring graphic depictions of what services our tax revenues fund (and which have taken the greatest hits), why Washington won't dig out of its deficit without an income tax, and more:

• I know it's not a pie, but still.

Continue reading »

The US economy added about 200,000 jobs in December, while the unemployment rate fell to 8.5 percent, its lowest mark since February 2009. That's marginally good news for workers, and marginally bad for Republicans counting on the economy edging worse, not better.

One of the better tidbits of news in the report was that we added 23,000 manufacturing jobs in December. A drop in the bucket compared to the losses these past few years, but a big move in the right direction.