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Recession Briefing: Bonuses are Back

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

Goldman Sachs, the world’s richest investment bank, could be about to pay its chief executive Lloyd Blankfein a bumper bonus of up to $100 million in defiance of moves by President Obama to take action against such payouts. (Times of London)

Professional sports teams, concert venues and opera houses may all be seeing drops in attendance as a result of the recession, but suburban community colleges are having the opposite problem. They’re running out of room. (Chicago Daily Herald)

California wine shipments fell in 2009 for the first time in 16 years as purchases in the U.K., the biggest export market, plunged during the global recession. (Bloomberg)

Key Obama economic adviser Larry Summers coined a telling way to look at the current American economic state of play. He said the U.S. is experiencing a “statistical recovery and a human recession.” (Wall Street Journal)

“There are a limited number of investment banks (or perhaps insurance companies or other firms) the failure of which would be so disturbing as to raise concern about a broader market disruption,” writes Paul Volcker, the chairman of the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. A new authority should be created “to intervene in the event that a systemically critical capital market institution is on the brink of failure. (New York Times)

The government’s response to the financial meltdown has made it more likely the United States will face a deeper crisis in the future, an independent watchdog at the Treasury Department warned. (Associated Press)

The deficit for the current fiscal year will reach nearly $1.6 trillion, a new post-World War II high, with the addition of about $100 billion in additional tax cuts and public works spending that President Obama has proposed to spur job creation, according to the administration. (New York Times)

Recipients of economic-stimulus money said 599,108 workers were being paid by the funds in the last quarter of 2009, fewer than the number of jobs attributed to the package in the seven months after it was enacted. (Wall Street Journal)

Tishman Speyer Properties walks away from 11,232 Manhattan apartments because it can’t pay its mortgage. That’s good business. So why can’t an individual? (Associated Press)

“I stopped paying my $1,450-a-month mortgage on my 200-year-old, four-bedroom home in September 2008 — after making the hard decision to walk away from my mortgage because it is hopelessly underwater,” writes Janet Speer. (New York Post)

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Tags: banks, financial crisis, jobs, real estate, recession