News

Recession Briefing 2.10

What you need to know today to survive and thrive in the recession.

Professor Obama’s First Seminar (Slate)
Calm, cool, and commanding. Slate’s John Dickerson thinks the president ran his prime-time press conference like a grad-school class, schooling America in his stimulus plan and speaking in (wow!) complete sentences.

Recession Not Affecting Sex Lives, Survey Says (Fox News)
Consumer Reports magazine says that of those who are sexually active and willing to talk, 79 percent said their personal financial situation has not affected their frequency of sex. Five percent are even having sex more often.

Freakoutonomics (NY Mag)
Few are feeling the city’s economic pain as acutely as shopkeepers, restaurant proprietors, and small-business owners. Amid eerily empty sidewalks and race-to-the-bottom sales, the questions are: What will it take for them to survive? And how are you doling out your dollars?

Icelandic Dining After the Collapse (WSJ)
Moose carpaccio, anyone? Despite a money crisis, the island nation’s restaurants still offer such joys as puffin, reindeer, horse, moose, and exquisitely odiferous putrefied Greenland shark. Yum.

Recovery May Come Sooner Than You Think (Alley Insider)
The Great Depression wasn’t a decade-long disaster.  It was two recessions separated by a four-year boom. And prosperity, Paul Kasriel says, may be just around the corner.

Banks to Get Stress Test Before Aid (WSJ)
Many U.S. banks will be subjected to rigorous examinations to see if they are healthy enough to lend before receiving additional financial aid. The stress tests will be part of the bailout revamp to be announced Tuesday by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

Taking on Critics, Obama Puts Aside Talk of Unity (NYT)
With no Republicans in the House voting for the economic plan and just three in the Senate, Mr. Obama on Monday began a week of barnstorming stops that will also take him to Florida and Illinois to create momentum behind his program.

Geithner Said to Have Prevailed on the Bailout (NYT)
Score one for the Secretary. The Obama administration’s new plan to bail out the nation’s banks was fashioned after a spirited internal debate that pitted the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, against some of the president’s top political hands.

Starbucks to sell value-meal pairings for $3.95 (AP)
Starbucks Corp., which is trying to refashion its image as a more recession-friendly coffeehouse, offered more details Monday on the breakfast “pairings” it will sell beginning March 3.

10 Tips for Taxpayers Hit by the Recession (NYT)
For many tax filers, this tax season may be unlike any other. If you’ve lost your job, are searching for a new one or attempting to strike out on your own, your tax return may be affected.

Bloomberg: Recession won’t morph into an American depression (Seattle PI)
Columnist John Dorfman lists six reasons why we’ll avoid a depression. For one, he thinks that the Internet, television and air travel make it easier for people living in one place to take advantage of job opportunities in another.

Balls says recession is “worst in 100 years” (Reuters UK)
British Schools Secretary Ed Balls is Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s closest cabinet minister. And he’s dropped a fiscal bomb. The Secretary warns that the world is facing its worst recession in more than a century, surpassing even the Great Depression of the 1930s.

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