- Wall Street bonuses jumped 17% last year. “For most Americans, these huge bonuses are a bitter pull and hard to comprehend,” NY State comptroller Tom DiNapoli says. “Taxpayers bailed them out, and now they’re back making money while many New York families are still struggling to make ends meet.”
- Costs of recessions run deep. “Recessions cause skills to depreciate, there are psychological costs, there are costs to family members, the loss of a job generally means loss of health care, the costs to working class households go on and on,” Mark Thoma writes.
- “The alliance that has held back reform begins to crack,” former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson says. “The middle of the consensus has started to move, against mega-banks and against dangerous over borrowing by the financial sector. This will be a long hard slog, but we are finally heading in the right direction.”
- “Expensive and ineffective attempts to fight foreclosures at all costs” has been one of the Obama administration’s most disappointing policy initiatives, Barry Ritholtz notes.
- “The slowdown in the foreclosure rate (now about 1/3 of sales down from a high of 1/2), the home buying tax credit, and the artificial suppression of mortgage rates have all helped to cushion the decline in prices,” says Peter Boockvar. “But when much of this wears off this summer, the market will be put to another test.”
- Problem bank list continues to expand. Hits 702 banks with $403 billion in assets – the largest amount since 1992. “Not all problem banks will fail – and not all failures will be from the problem bank list – but this shows the problem is significant and still growing,” Calculated Risk writes.
- Wal-Mart (WMT) should’ve made the bigger bet on Netflix (NFLX), Dan Frommer argues at Silicon Alley Insider after WMT paid a reported $100 million for video streaming service Vudu.
- Twitter reaches a fresh milestone, saying it’s publishing 50 million tweets a day, or about 600 messages a second.
- Pent-up iPad demand seems to be exceeding demand estimates when original iPhone was released, which is surprising, John Paczkowski says. “The iPad is, after all, an entirely new device category between the laptop computer and the smartphone. And, unlike the iPhone, its market is unproven.”
- Atlanta Fed’s macroblog takes a deeper look behind the core CPI data reported last week.
- Yves Smith’s take on Vogue profiling Tim Geithner: “I suppose puff pieces to hide the true character of what passes for our leaders are a more civilized way to distract the public from the rot in the empire than killing gladiators, but it sure doesn’t feel that way.”
