Europe is in the midst of its longest recession since it began keeping records in 1995 -- even surpassing the calamity that hit the region in the financial crisis of 2008-2009. While the German economy grew 0.1% from the fourth quarter of 2012 to the first quarter of this year, just about everyone else in the eurozone is shrinking.

France’s economy shrank 0.2% quarter on quarter, and is now officially back in recession after just one quarter of positive growth. It’s not alone: Cyprus, Finland, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain are all in recession right now. And while the UK managed to just barely avoid a triple-dip recession by growing 0.3% in the first quarter, its economy is still 2.6% smaller than it was 5 years ago.

Yesterday, Pew’s latest eurozone survey confirmed that the continent’s sentiment matches its dour economic data. The survey’s disconcerting conclusion:

The European Union is the new sick man of Europe. The effort over the past half century to create a more united Europe is now the principal casualty of the euro crisis... The prolonged economic crisis has created centrifugal forces that are pulling European public opinion apart, separating the French from the Germans and the Germans from everyone else.

Median support for the EU stands at 45%, down 15 percentage points in just the last year. Across the eight surveyed countries, only 26% think the economic integration has strengthened their national economy, a 6 point decline from last year.

The data shows that as Europe’s division and disillusion grows, a familiar, and politically worrying, trend is emerging. Joshua Tucker says that the Germans aren’t just living, as Pew puts it, on another continent, they “appear to be living on a different planet.” 75% of surveyed Germans think their domestic economy is good, compared to a median of just 9% in the other countries surveyed who said the same about their domestic economy. 77% of Germans said their personal economic situation is good. Barely more than half said the same elsewhere.

An economically ascendant and politically isolated Germany was precisely what the euro was meant to prevent. Instead, George Soros says the “euro is in the process of destroying the European Union.” -- Ben Walsh

On to today’s links:

Must Read
Inside the massive drug company that fabricated test results for AIDS medication and generics - Fortune

New Markets
Buyouts are so 2009: Blackstone is building dams in Uganda now - WSJ

Politicking
Hedge funds bet on their ability to change the government's mind on Fannie and Freddie - WSJ

MOOCs
Harvard professors are not huge fans of free online courses - Bloomberg

Kids Today
"The Pentagon estimates that only one in four of today's youth are fit for military service" - CNN

Leaders
Lloyd Blankfein, willing listener to Jamie Dimon's problems - DealBook

Second Acts
Sallie Krawkcheck buys 85 Broads - DealBook

Hilarious
The 21 Fiercest Things Richard Nixon ever did - Alex Pareene

New Normal
The world is in a bond drought - Reuters

Layoffs
HSBC will cut another 14,000 jobs - Reuters

Bitcoin
Homeland Security shuts down major Bitcoin payment system - BetaBeat

And, of course, there are many more links at Counterparties.

Institutional Shareholder Services’ message is clear: no one man should have all that power.

More specifically, ISS has declared Jamie Dimon shouldn’t be JP Morgan’s chairman and CEO. The firm, which advises shareholders on corporate voting, is also recommending that its clients not support the reelection of three of the bank's directors. Each of those directors -- David Cote, James Crown and Ellen Futter -- sits on the bank’s risk committee. The proposal to split the roles of chairman and CEO is non-binding; the re-election of board members is binding. It’s unclear whether either measure will pass.

The risk committee, whose oversight failed spectacularly prior to and during last year’s $6.2 billion trading loss, has no members who have worked at a bank or as financial risk managers. ISS called the committee members’ “lack of robust industry-specific experience” odd, particularly compared to their counterparts at JPM’s competitors.

The WSJ’s Francesco Guerrera wrote last month that the era of the “imperial chief executive” might be winding down on Wall Street. The trend goes beyond finance. Boeing and GE faced (and defeated) proposals to split the roles of chairman and CEO this year. With shareholders demanding more scrutiny of management, the “current Wall Street incumbents are likely to be the last ones to hold a dual role”.

Dimon does have at least one high profile shareholder on his side. Warren Buffett says he is “100% for Jamie... I couldn’t think of a better chairman”, which is no surprise to Jonathan Weil. JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway share a director (Stephen Burke), and Buffett is a JP Morgan shareholder. The avuncular investor is also chairman and CEO of his own company, but tellingly, that won’t continue past his lifetime.

Shareholders may be able to take comfort in executives’ discomfort. One study found that “companies that had separated the two roles received a 28-percent higher five-year return”. - Ben Walsh

On to today’s links:

Lawsuits
NY attorney general to sue BofA and Wells Fargo over mortgage practices - Reuters

Remuneration
The top paying-industry for big-name execs? Media - NYT

Subsidies
The average student pays just 55% of the advertised price for college - WSJ

Austerity Bites
The era of austerity is over, according to the French finance minister - Bloomberg
"There probably will not be any major changes in Europe until after Merkel's reelection" on Sept. 22 - Calculated Risk

Legalese
The Supreme Court under Roberts is the most business-friendly court since WWII - NYT
"How business fares in the Supreme Court" - Minnesota Law Review
MBIA, Bank of America reach legal settlement - Reuters

Deals
BMC Software agrees to $6.9 billion acquisition by private equity group - Reuters
The deal is a win for private equity, and for major shareholder Elliott Management - DealBook

New Normal
The recovery is non-existent if you don't have a college degree - Josh Brown

Possibly Useless Data
"The data crunchers are invading Hollywood" - NYT

Remuneration
Are stock buybacks in the interest of shareholders or CEO bonuses? Both. Maybe. - WSJ
“Buybacks are an efficient way of returning money to shareholders of a shrinking company” - Felix

Yikes
If you've ordered mutton in China recently you may have eaten rat - Reuters

Alpha
Is Soros shorting the Australian dollar? Someone seems to be - Sydney Morning Herald

Startups
The Instagram story: From launch to a $1 billion sale in 18 months - Kara Swisher

And, of course, there are many more links at Counterparties.

JP Morgan may be going back to banking basics. Instead of losing billions in arcane, illiquid credit instruments, the bank’s latest scandal is a classic: overcharging unwitting customers.

Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Ben Protess report that JP Morgan is in some very hot water with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). According to an agency memo, the bank turned “money-losing power plants into powerful profit centers”.

Under other circumstances, that’d be just another win for JP Morgan’s booming commodities division. The problem is that JP Morgan’s success came through allegedly duping California and Michigan state officials into overpaying for energy by $83 million. These same allegations were included in Joshua Rosner’s comprehensive review of the bank’s regulatory lapses published in March.

When confronted by regulators, Blythe Masters, the bank’s head of commodities, made “false and misleading statements”,  FERC says. The traders working for Masters “planned and executed a systematic cover-up” of the trades,” and an email from Masters instructed an internal document to be rewritten. Importantly, the agency plans to hold both JP Morgan and individuals at the bank liable for any infractions.

Additionally, the WSJ, relying on a separate confidential regulatory document, reports that the usually tame-to-a-fault Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is planning to punish the bank for its consumer debt collection practices.

The American Banker surveys the damage under the heading “Jamie in the hot seat”. Dimon has continued to revamp his management team -- hiring a new new vice chairman yesterday to replace an outgoing ally. With at least eight federal agencies investigating the bank, JP Morgan may soon have additional management slots to fill, possibly including Dimon’s role as chairman. - Ben Walsh

Compelling
How textile kings weave a hold on Bangladesh - Reuters

Tech
Twitter hires Morgan Stanley banker, may or may not be considering an IPO - WSJ

Servicey
REITs with no employees are probably not great at looking out for investors - Bloomberg

EU Mess
European Commission suggests giving countries more time to get their deficits cuts in order - WSJ

Felix
A deeper look at the slow jobs recovery - Felix Salmon
Full text of the April jobs report - BLS

Wonks
Does population growth necessarily lead to higher housing prices? - Paul Krugman

Possibly Useless Data
On a price-per-hour basis, haute cuisine cheaper than a massage - Eatocracy

Good Points
Predicting jobs data is not only hard — it's also useless - Barry Ritholtz

Ouch
BNP Paribas CEO satisfied with the bank's 45% profit drop - CNBC

And, of course, there are many more links at Counterparties.

This chart, however, shows that austerity measures play a bigger role than the size of the financial sector when it comes to depressing post-crisis growth. Post financial crisis GDP growth is on the x-axis, and financial sector assets as a percentage of GDP is on the y-axis:

The Swiss economy is more highly financialized than the UK’s, and has had strong post-crisis growth. Meanwhile, Spain, with a much smaller financial sector, implemented austerity measures along with the UK and has also seen its economy shrink considerably.

Growth can survive in a heavily financialized economy, but it can’t withstand austerity. The other clear takeaway here is that Australia is fortunate to find itself full of natural resources that China wants to buy.

“To say highly speculative would be the understatement of the century.” – Steve Hanke

“People say it’s a Ponzi scheme, it’s a bubble... We have elected to put our money and faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error.” – The Winklevii

“Bitcoins are not an investment. They are an investment fad that someday could be a real digital currency, but if they continue to behave as they have, they will instead be nothing.” – Kurt Eichenwald

“Three eras of currency: Commodity based, e.g. Gold; Politically based, e.g. Dollar; Math based, e.g. Bitcoin” – Chris Dixon (VC and alternative currency investor)

“What kind of commodity is Bitcoin? Well, it's a technologically-impressive product out to revolutionize the world with absolutely no fundamentals to justify its billion-dollar valuation. It's the ultimate dotcom stock, minus the sock puppet.” – Matt O’Brien

“Money is: 1. A unit of account; 2. A store of value; 3. A medium of exchange. Right now, Bitcoin is none of those things (in any serious sense)” – Justin Wolfers

“If Bitcoin wants to become a global currency used by the masses, CVS cash-drops won't work.” – Kevin Roose

“Bitcoin unites futuristic left-wing Internet anarchism... with the cave-dwelling right-wing libertarianism of goldbugs.” – Eric Posner

“Traditional currency is garbage :)” – Erik Vorhees

“Either Bitcoinia will remain a small, fringe economy thanks to inherent instability, or a stabilising financial structure will somehow grow within it.” – Ryan Avent

“Bitcoin doesn’t need to be a good unit of account or a good store of value to be a good medium of exchange.” – Jerry Brito

“Mt. Gox halted trading, saying the market needed to "cool down" after a massive sell-off yesterday.” – Matt Boesler

“I'm raising my Bitcoin price target to $400. Just kidding.” – Henry Blodget

“We ran a Monte Carlo simulation on the impact to Bitcoin's exchange rate with the euro if Cyprus left the Eurozone.” – PolyCapitalist

“Fiat currencies have tremendous intrinsic value because governments say they do.” – Joe Weisethal

“The Libertarian Party is now accepting Bitcoin donations. Because of course it is.” – Garance Franke-Ruta

“I kinda love the Mt Gox trading halt because it forces BTC users to value the product on their own.” – Kid Dynamite

“Bitcoin is the Napster of payments – the flawed writing on the wall for banking as we know it” – Chris Cook

"We needed to be the first New York bar to accept Bitcoins.” – Charlie Shrem

“Nobody can come in and force quantitative easing.” – David Jones

“It’s based on mistrust rather than trust, it refuses to take any responsibility onto itself – indeed, it doesn’t even have a self to take responsibility onto. It’s nihilistic.” – Felix

“Bitcoin isn’t tied to any commodity – besides trust.” – Paul Ford

“Bitcoins are without intrinsic value as assets, yet they have risen too fast in value to be much use as a currency... sounds a bit like a familiar commodity, gold.” – Justin Fox

“If you believe a currency’s value lies in its stability, Bitcoin represents the polar opposite of that sort of system.” – Izabella Kaminska

– Ben Walsh

On to today’s links:

Ugh
From 2000 to 2011, 11.5 million Americans lost their employer-provided health insurance – The Hill

Alpha
John Paulson is launching a a fund to help investors "mitigate income taxes" – Bloomberg

Comparisons
Paper or pixel? How we read on the page and on the screen – Scientific American

Welcome To Adulthood
Since 2007, student debt has doubled to $1.1 trillion – Bloomberg

EU Mess
Cyprus may lift capital controls in the next few days – WSJ
The latest Eurogroup statement on Cyprus – Consilium
From heart attacks to maternal care: the human cost of austerity in Greece – Open Democracy

JP Morgan
JP Morgan cuts costs and is profitable for the 12th quarter in a row – Reuters
Jamie Dimon's 10 stages of blubbering London Whale grief – Stephen Gandel

Oxpeckers
Jonah Peretti's in 2008: "The future of the industry is advertising as content" – Jason del Rey

Revolvoving Door
The problem with Promontory – Felix

Innumeracy
Personal finance classes don't lead to better financial decisions, but math classes do – HBS

WTF
"A Fox Business exclusive: the gold chocolate bar" – Fox Business

Cephalopods
Goldman Sachs invests in web-based muppet factory – Kevin Roose

Data Points
Who likes taxes? Democrats, nerds, and people getting refunds – Slate
Southerners might not be more obese – maybe they're just more honest – Animal NY

Interesting
Pay down pension liabilities by increasing cigarette taxes – The Hayride

Wonks
Expert dead horse-beater Paul Krugman explains the secrets of his craft – Businessweek

And, of course, there are many more links at Counterparties.

The more likely scenario is that Leonard, along with his brother Ronald, will maintain their earlier level philanthropy. While large, their earlier gifts were far below the billion dollar level. Leonard has given $131 million to the Whitney, and Ronald is a large supporter of Jewish charities. Both brothers and their wives have also founded, endowed, and serve on the boards of numerous non-profits (the full lists run for text dense paragraphs on the Carnegie Foundation and Estée Lauder websites).

Despite their giving, the Lauder brothers' net worth has increased.  According to the AP, they inherited a total of $5.1 billion in 2004. Per Forbes, Leonard's wealth grew to $3.6 billion in 2008, and topped $8 billion just before his gift to the Met. Ronald's net worth in 2008 was $3.4 billion, took a dive to $2 billion in 2009 and is now $3.6 billion. Particularly for Leonard, that's not the pattern you'd expect from a lauded  philanthropist. Personal net worth should decline, not dramatically increase. That's especially true late in life.

Estée Lauder's proxy shows why Leonard's wealth has increased so dramatically. As of 2012, Leonard owned 3.6 million class A shares and is the beneficiary of a trust that owns 90 million class B shares. The key difference between the A and B shares is that B shares have 10 times the voting rights whenever they are owned by someone whose last name is Lauder. As a result, Leonard holds a little over 53% of the voting power in company. Ronald holds a much smaller stake in the family business (about 11 million shares). Crucially for both Leonard and Ronald's personal finances, Estée Lauder stock is up about 200% since 2004. So the fact that Leonard's wealth is almost entirely tied up in a stock that has tripled, explains how Leonard managed to add $5 billion to his net worth in less than a decade.

It also means that his gift to the Met will probably be the last large donation of Leonard's life and why, by his own high standards, his peak collecting days are behind him. To build the kind of collection he has given away, he told the NY that you have to be "focused, disciplined, tenacious and willing to pay more than you can possibly afford".  If Leonard wants to keep control of Estée Lauder, more than he can afford isn't that much, at least by the art market's current high standards. He's rich, but he doesn't have enough liquid wealth to buy museum worthy art and keep 50+% of the votes in Estée Lauder. Even if you're worth $7 billion, you have to make choices.

Margaret Thatcher, Britain's longest serving Prime Minister, died today at the age of 87.

Thatcher famously said “there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families”. The BBC’s Stephanie Flanders sums up Thatcher’s economic legacy by saying that before her, there was “no such thing as the consumer. When she left, politicians spoke of little else... she helped force the rise of the individual at the expense of the collective”.

Dylan Matthews says that Thatcher’s economic policies were “heavy on union-busting, spending cuts, privatization and deregulation, undoing as much as she could of the social welfare state”.

Matt Phillips reviews Thatcher’s legacy as an inflation-fighter. When Thatcher left office inflation was running at 8%, down from more than 20%. That was due, in part, to reduced government spending -- but it’s also worth remembering that Thatcher’s government predated the era of central-bank independence, so she (and her Chancellors) controlled monetary policy as well as fiscal policy. Her record on employment was more mixed. The UK’s jobless rate was over 10% for the majority of Thatcher’s leadership. It took nine years after she left office in 1990 for the rate to fall below 6%.

Thatcher’s government also fought, at times literally, with labor unions, most notably with coal miners in 1984-1985. The strikes were wrenching, widespread, and deeply political in a way Americans have not seen for more than a generation. The miners had terrible, dangerous jobs, and fought unsuccessfully to keep them. Megan McArdle concludes that the Prime Minister “destroyed an industrial system which had yes, provided workers with a secure livelihood, but yes, also done so at an unacceptable cost”.

An inextricable part of that legacy, McArdle argues, was a transformation: “post-1970s Britain has been a very good place for educated elites, and not very good for the post-industrial working class”. Former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown, on the other hand, thinks Thatcher’s policies helped usher in current levels of poverty and inequality.

Thatcher was an early euro-sceptic, and, as Joe Weisenthal says, rather presciently saw how richer European nations like Germany would balk at bailing out poorer nations. During a 1990 Prime Minister’s Questions, she warned that the single currency would result in “taking many democratic powers away from democratically-elected bodies to non-elected ones”. -- Ben Walsh

On to today’s links:

Remuneration
CEO pay rose just 2.8% last year -- but perks rose nearly 19% - NYT

Longreads
The slow, thorough destruction of the news business - Frank Rich

Hope/Change/Etc.
After a terrible jobs report, Obama's budget is expected to drop stimulus for benefit cuts - Bloomberg

Remuneration
Google's free meals may no longer be free lunches (from a tax perspective) - WSJ

Wonks
Why Japan is the most interesting story in economics right now - Neil Irwin
How to cope with Japan's monetary boom (if you must) - WSJ

Revolving Door
Where regulators go to get rich - William Cohan
At least 28 of Max Baucus's former aides are now tax lobbyists - Ezra Klein

New Normal
The vanishing American worker - WaPo
"The problem of people dropping out of the labor force is likely much worse than is generally recognized" - Dean Baker

Yikes
"I continue to expect the U.S. economy to join a global recession that is already in progress" - John Hussman

Hilarious
Roger Ebert did not savagely review 'Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo' - NYT

Comparisons
Thatcher's fiscal policy -- less austere than Cameron or early Blair - Chris Dillow

Housing
Suburbs "sustain and reinforce inequality" - NYT

Alpha
An infamous rogue trader will now advise Irish struggling borrowers - Bloomberg

Charts
The recovery isn't dying -- it's just not really helping - James Hamilton

And, of course, there are many more links at Counterparties.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has quantified the size of the offshore tax haven bubble, and is doing its darndest to burst it.

The group, led by Gerard Ryle, and working with 38 media outlets, has amassed 2.5 million documents containing details of more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts, as well as the identities of almost 130,000 individuals.

The documents implicate a wide-ranging and sleazy set of the global elite: politicians, despots, and their aides and associates; the oldest daughter of former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos; a wealthy Spanish art collector; arms dealers. Also mentioned is Denise Rich, the wife of the controversially pardoned oil-trader Marc Rich.

Der Speigel writes that the details in the documents go back nearly 30 years. The 200 gigabyte leak, the German paper writes, is 160 times larger than the cables released by Wikileaks in 2010. Gawker has a good run-down of the important details that have been released so far.

A former chief economist for McKinsey estimates there could be as much as $32 trillion in offshore taxhavens.  Creating sham corporations in offshore locations, and stocking their boards with phony directors, is a lucrative cottage industry. One British couple on the the island of Nevis served as directors for 2,000 companies.

Individuals aren’t alone in seeking fairer climates for their assets to winter in. The biggest US companies increased their untaxed offshore cash piles by  $183 billion, or 14.4%, in 2012. Victor Fleischer, a tax law professor, details the arcane mechanisms companies use to get and keep that money in low-tax jurisdictions. Some of the more common strategies include alternating short-term loans between foreign and domestic subsidiaries, and transferring intellectual property abroad. Starbucks, like Google and Microsoft, is among the companies that use these techniques.

Ending these practices may involve more data dumps like today's. Last year, both the European Union and the UK announced their intention to crack down on tax havens. A key tactic? Naming and shaming companies and individuals that use legal tax-avoidance schemes. -- Ben Walsh

On to today’s links:

Long Reads
The cost of building Apple's new headquarters has ballooned to $5 billion - Businessweek

Bold Moves
Japan embarks on "monetary easing in an entirely new dimension" - NYT

Regulations
Can a judge really block the SEC's $600 million settlement with Steven Cohen? - Theodoric Meyer
A "quintessential captured regulator" is leaving the SEC - Gary Weiss

Housing
Foreclosure reviews created a "bureaucratic maze that delayed relief" and enriched consultants - DealBook
What the GAO found: "complexity... overly broad guidance, and limited monitoring" - GAO

EU Mess
"The ECB's main preoccupation has become the playing of chicken with governments" - Economist

RIP
Roger Ebert is dead at 70 - Chicago Sun-Times

Wonks
What happened to the Internet productivity miracle? - John Cassidy
Central banks have "virtually no influence over long-term real (inflation-adjusted) rates" - Ken Rogoff

Alpha
Carlyle, KKR, and Blackstone want a piece of your 401(k) - Bloomberg
Workers are getting misleading information about their 401(k) options when they switch jobs - WaPo

Oxpeckers
“Can I make the semicolon interesting to people who used to be into the kind of stuff I did at Vice?" - NYT

Best Practices
The top risk managers run spy networks that rely on human intel, not models - Jesse Eisinger

Interesting
"Rents are flat or falling in markets where investors are most active" - Trulia

Remuneration
Physically and verbally abusive ex-Rutgers coach is due a $100,000 bonus - AP

Advanced Strategy
The laundry detergent business is almost too innovative - WSJ

Regulations
Activist courts are hobbling Dodd-Frank - Mike Konczal

Compelling
The death of peak oil - James Hamilton

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

And, of course, there are many more links at Counterparties.

If you’re looking for evidence of just how far the housing market has come since its implosion triggered the financial crisis, consider Fannie Mae. The housing giant seized by US government five years ago reported a record profit of $17 billion for 2012, after a roughly equal loss in 2011. It’s Fannie’s first annual profit since 2006; as  Clea Benson notes, the profit eclipsed that of companies like Wal-Mart, GE and Berkshire Hathaway.

Drilling down into Fannie’s filing gives you a snapshot of the American housing market. The company set aside less to cover future losses on loans it guaranteed ($62 billion, compared to $76 billion in 2011); suffered lower delinquency rates; had higher loan volume and higher fees; and saw the value of its derivatives positions improve. Bill McBride at Calculated Risk pulls out another bright spot: Fannie says that there was a “4.7% increase in home prices in 2012 compared with a home price decline of 3.7% in 2011.”

Fannie’s earnings could have been $59 billion higher, Benson adds. Due to an agreement with Treasury, any net worth beyond $3 billion cannot be retained by Fannie and instead must be paid back to taxpayers. As soon as the first quarter of this year, Fannie could be required to report $59 billion in assets that had previously been written off, and most of that would have to be shipped to the US government to stay under the cap. David Reilly notes that that payment, along with $31.4 billion in dividends already paid to government, would mean Fannie will have paid the Treasury a total of $90 billion. That may look like a large chunk of the $116 billion pumped in by the US taxpayer, but in fact that $116 billion is still going to be outstanding: Fannie’s just paying dividends, here, rather than repaying debt.

It may also be hard for Fannie to repeat the successes of 2012. Matthew Klein notices that Fannie isn’t as hedged as it could be, and wonders how much of this year’s “record profits can be attributed to excessive interest-rate risk”.

Fannie’s current success may keep it in government hands that much longer. Why would the US relinquish control of what Peter Eavis notes is the most profitable insurance company in the country, just as its massive bailout was close to turning a (slight) profit? There’s also the small problem that no one has a real plan for extricating Fannie and Freddie from government control.

Instead, Shahien Nasiripour reports, the rough plan is to create a new public utility to compete with the two companies. That “single securitisation platform” will still be taxpayer-backed. -- Ryan McCarthy and Ben Walsh

On to today’s links:

Right On
How paid paternity leave could stimulate the economy - Catherine Rampell

Takedown of a takedown
The problem with David Stockman - Neil Irwin

China
The annual toll of Chinese air pollution: 1.2 million premature deaths - NYT

EU Mess
Ireland: where delinquent mortgages are common, but evictions are rare - Matt Phillips
Cyprus's finance minister has resigned - Bloomberg

Revolving Door
Former SEC chief Mary Schapiro declares revolving door dead, joins shadow regulator - WSJ
A thorough guide to Promontory, DC's "shadow regulator" firm - American Banker

Regulators
Why do bank capital rules treat loans as riskier than derivatives? - Sheila Bair

Wonks
What you don't know about poverty - Lant Pritchett

Contrarian
Is the demand for high-skilled workers actually falling? - Arnold Kling

Says Science
Shakespeare was a tax-dodging grain hoarder - Telegraph

Oxpeckers
You can't stop ESPN's economic success, you can only hope to contain it - Economist

Billionaire Whimsy
The London neighborhood so exclusive, it's empty - NYT

Dubious Milestones
Forget Dow 36,000 -- we've just hit Bitcoin $1 billion - Verge

Data Points
The benefits of being a philosophy major, and of not being a communications major - Pleas and Excuses

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

And, of course, there are many more links at Counterparties.

Of the 27 million Americans working part-time jobs, very few land positions that pay $488,709. That’s the average annual pay for a director at Goldman Sachs, Susanne Craig writes:

Some of the firm’s 13 directors make more than $500,000 because they have extra responsibilities... Goldman’s board is the best compensated of any big American bank and the fifth-highest paid of any company in the country... Some of its rivals are not that far behind. The nation’s biggest banks paid their directors over $95,000 a year more on average in 2011 than what other large corporations paid.

A Goldman spokesman notes that director compensation is increasing because of the firm’s rising share price, but that fails to address the size of the initial equity award. As Felix has noted, the best way to pay directors is to emulate how Warren Buffett does it, giving them “a modest four-figure sum”.

Despite (or because of) their exorbitant compensation, oversight from directors at US banks was largely nonexistent in the run-up to the financial crisis. Now banks insist that because of increased legal risks and time requirements, largely resulting from the financial crisis their boards did little to mitigate, they have to pay top dollar to attract qualified directors. But the caliber of bank board members is hardly awe-inspiring. Take JP Morgan: none of the directors on the board’s risk committee has worked at a bank or as a financial risk manager.

It’s not just bank boards that have problems. James Stewart details just how hard it is to get rid of directors, even after they’ve made boneheaded decisions. Despite running the company like a “tawdry reality TV show”, with disastrous financial results, each member of the HP board was re-elected last month. HP isn’t an isolated case, either. Stewart cites statistics from Institutional Shareholder Services showing that of 17,081 director nominees at US companies, only 61, or 0.36%, failed to get support from a majority of shareholders last year.

Barclays’ new chairman, David Walker, is trying to make his pay more defensible: he’ll be working at least four days a week to overhaul the board he leads, albeit on a $1.17 million annual salary. Walker is at least committing to do more than dial-in to the odd conference call, and show up to vote yes on management’s decisions once a quarter. Working more is the other way to make your work-to-pay ratio more defensible. -- Ben Walsh

On to today’s links:

The Fed
Why we should thank the Fed for crushing savers - James Surowiecki

EU Mess
Why the Euro is doomed in four steps - Matthew O’Brien

Popular Myths
"There's simply no statistical evidence of a broader renaissance" in US manufacturing - WSJ

Inequities
Annals of gender diversity, Pimco edition - Felix

Alpha
5 dumb mistakes for investing in the QE era - WSJ
Only 30% of SAC's AUM comes from outside the firm - Katie Benner

Takedowns
The "meme hustler": A lengthy attack of one of the web's most prominent evangelists - Evgeny Morozov

Charts
The simple, boring reason why disability insurance has exploded: demographics - Brad Plumer
Why you should care about a divergence in two main inflation indicators - Greg Ip
The remarkable persistence of US economic growth, 1790-present - Conversable Economist

Housing
The housing market is coming back -- but it's still hard to get a new mortgage - Nick Timiraos

Oxpeckers
Online journalism "a bad business so far", say slideshow manufacturers - Choire Sicha

Wonks
Oliver Blanchard's 5 lessons for economists from the financial crisis - WSJ

Corporate Largesse
Regulatory filing of the day: Wynn pays for an execs' $9.3 million house renovation - Footnoted

Leaders
Board members spending more time being board members, board members report - WSJ

Apple
Steve Jobs' first boss: "Very few companies would hire Steve, even today" - Mercury News

New Normal
There are 284,000 American college graduates working in minimum-wage jobs - WSJ

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

And, of course, there are many more links at Counterparties.