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Recession Briefing: C.E.O.’s Start Apologizing

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

Since the job market’s peak in June 2007, there are approximately 50 percent fewer job openings for the 15.3 million U.S. citizens who are officially unemployed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Huffington Post)

As America recovers from the recession, some of the nation’s chief executives are offering that rarest of statements — an apology. But often, their words are so carefully parsed, scrubbed by lawyers or picked over by public relations professionals that it is unclear just how much mea is in their culpa. (New York Times)

The $787 billion economic stimulus package was responsible for keeping between 1.5 million and two million jobs in the economy through the end of 2009, White House economists said Tuesday. (Wall Street Journal)

The irony of efforts to rein in or to rationalize out-of-control pay scales for corporate executives and bankers is that in general they have ultimately made the problem worse, not better. (The Big Money)

The Federal Reserve said Tuesday that it returned to taxpayers a record $46 billion in profit from its rescue of the financial system, while a congressional committee announced that it had subpoenaed controversial bailout documents from the central bank. (McClatchyDC)

After an extended slump, technology spending will rev back to life in 2010, according to analyst firm Forrester. The report found an 8.2 percent drop in US tech spending in 2009, but predicted the market would grow 6.6 percent this year.(Christian Science Monitor)

A map shows the 20 most economically stressed counties in America with populations over 25,000 and their November 2009 Stress scores, according to The Associated Press Economic Stress Index. (Associated Press)

The number of new businesses being set up around the world has declined in the face of the global recession, a report has found. New start-ups were down 10% last year in 20 of the world’s richest nations, said the latest edition of the annual Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. (BBC)

The hearings chaired by Ferdinand Pecora, who in the early 1930s led a congressional investigation into wrongdoing on Wall Street that ushered in the Securities and Exchange Commission and a half century of financial regulation, echo in today’s investigation into the causes of the Great Recession. (USA Today)

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. advanced a proposal Tuesday to penalize banks for risky compensation practices despite public opposition from other federal banking agencies, exposing tensions among senior officials over the government’s proper role in shaping pay practices. (Washington Post)

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Tags: business, financial crisis, jobs