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Recession Briefing 10.20: Hawaii Schools Out for Recession

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

School’s out for recession: Teacher furloughs in Hawaii will shut down the school system for 17 Fridays beginning this week. (Honolulu Advertiser)

Companies across the economy are holding off on hiring even as the profit outlook improves, amid economic uncertainty and their own success at raising productivity in rough waters. (Wall Street Journal)

Among the recession’s more unlikely victims have been infertile Western couples wanting children and prepared to travel abroad to use Indian surrogate mothers as a cheaper alternative to fertility clinics back home. (Agence France Presse)

The level of poverty in America is even worse than first believed. A revised formula for calculating medical costs and geographic variations show that approximately 47.4 million Americans last year lived in poverty, 7 million more than the government’s official figure. (Associated Press)

Regulators shut down San Joaquin Bank in California on Friday, marking the 99th failure this year of a federally insured bank. (Associated Press)

Even as the nation’s biggest financial firms were struggling and the federal government was spending hundreds of billions of dollars to save many of them, the companies were boosting the perks and benefits they pay their chief executives. (Washington Post)

The Obama Administration has unveiled a new housing bailout to aid state and local housing finance agencies, which provide mortgages to first-time and lower-income homebuyers and enable the development or rehabilitation of rental properties. (CNN/Money)

Many U.S. jobs lost during the recession may be gone forever and a weak employment market could linger for years. That could add up to a “new normal” of higher joblessness and lower standards of living for many Americans. (Associated Press)

“We may be looking at long-term, double-digit unemployment with official unemployment figures that understate the extent of the problem,” writes Mort Zuckerman. He suggests we need additional funding for infrastructure and innovation.  (Financial Times)

It’s frustrating for taxpayers that the banks and car companies in which they have stakes aren’t performing better, writes Daniel Gross. But Washington isn’t to blame for the change in the competitive landscape. (Slate)

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Tags: banks, education, jobs, The Unemployed Life, Wall Street