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Recession Briefing: The End of Saturday Mail?

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

The U.S. postmaster general seeks big changes to the way the U.S. Postal Service operates, including ending Saturday mail delivery. The USPS, grappling with the effects of the recession and the rise of e-mail and online bill paying, could lose up to $7 billion in 2010. (Christian Science Monitor)

The cachet of private school has taken a hit from the Great Recession, as parents question whether they can afford to pay for it, and whether it’s really worth the investment. (Slate)

Even as many Americans still struggle to recover from the country’s worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, another crisis – one that will be even worse than the current one – is looming, according to a new report. (ABC News)

Senators approved a bill extending unemployment benefits, highway funding and other federal programs Tuesday night after Republican Sen. Jim Bunning dropped his days-long blockade of the bill. (Washington Post)

Many towns in the USA where things still are made are caught in a winter between recession and recovery hoping the latter will arrive before the former kills the last decent blue-collar job. (USA Today)

The Federal Reserve has pushed mortgage rates to near half-century lows, but millions of U.S. homeowners haven’t benefited from that because they can’t — or won’t — refinance. (Wall Street Journal)

Everybody knew the recession would cut demand for energy. But some power executives have been surprised at how much. (Baltimore Sun)

Washington D.C. and nine other cities (among them: Boston, Los Angeles and a host of metros in Texas) are best surviving the downturn in part because they specialize in industries that are relatively insulated from economic volatility. (Forbes)

The pace of U.S. job cuts continued to slow last month. Automatic Data Processing, a payroll-processing firm, said private-sector employers cut 20,000 jobs in February, the fewest since February 2008 when employment first began to decline. (CNN/Money)

The number of poor people in New York rose by about 300,000, according to a new measure of poverty by the city that takes into account expenses like housing, medical costs and child care that the federal government does not include in its formulation. (New York Times)

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