You remember Friday’s gruesome employment report, right? Floyd Norris has taken a second look at it, and found something quite surprising:

Unemployment rates remained steady at 9.5 percent. And the number of jobs actually rose, by 80,000. And the number of jobs for college-educated Americans rose more than in any month in the last six years.

That big hike in unemployment to 10.2%, and all the other terrible, horrible, no good, very bad jobs numbers turn out to have been entirely a function of the BLS’s seasonal adjustments. As Norris writes:

All this may be very reasonable, and there is no way I can think of to test whether the seasonal adjustments are reliable. But I suspect seasonal factors are less important this year, when the economy may be changing directions, than they normally are.

Now even the unadjusted numbers aren’t all sweetness and light, especially when it comes to those with less education. But it does make sense to think that seasonal factors aren’t going to be the same this year as they are in other years.

Good on the AP for FOIAing the details of how cash-for-clunkers played out:

The single most common swap — which occurred more than 8,200 times — involved Ford F-150 pickup owners who took advantage of a government rebate to trade their old trucks for new Ford F-150s. The fuel economy for the new trucks ranged from 15 mpg to 17 mpg based on engine size and other factors, an improvement of just 1 mpg to 3 mpg over the clunkers.

It gets worse:

In at least 145 cases the government reported consumers traded old vehicles that got better than or the same mileage as the new vehicle they purchased. A driver in Negaunee, Mich., traded a 1987 Suburban that got 18 mpg for $3,500 toward a new Silverado pickup that got only 15 mpg. An Indianapolis driver traded a 1985 Mercedes 190 that got 27 mpg for $3,500 toward a new Volkswagen Rabbit that got only 24 mpg.

In at least 15 deals in nine states, owners of large pickups cashed in old trucks for between $3,500 and $4,500 toward new Hummer H3 SUVs that got only 16 mpg.

I think this is safely the worst policy implemented to date by the Obama administration: it has almost nothing in the way of redeeming features. Let’s hope it was some kind of weird aberration.

(HT Hiskes, via)

Another great chart from the people at nytimes.com: this one shows how unemployment has risen among various different segments of the population, since January 2007. Here’s what’s happened to the 12-month average employment rate for black men without a high-school degree under 25 years old:

Meanwhile, here’s the chart for white women ages 25 to 44 with a college degree:

In September, Tyler Cowen picked Berlin as his “preferred exile”:

There would be plenty of art and music, lots of smart people to talk to, access to other good locales, and the near-certainty of public order, yet with bearable winters and good health care.

Today, on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, he’s not so enthusiastic:

I like spending time in Berlin. But I am never sure I like Berlin itself, West or East. Berlin is Germany being imperial. Berlin is Germany looking toward the east. Today Berlin is Germany pretending it is normal, while not yet having a new identity.

Maybe the change in tone is a function of all the news coverage about Berlin right now, all of it concentrating on the city’s historical importance. But the fact is that for all Berlin is now the capital of the most important country in Europe, it’s still, as its unofficial slogan puts it, arm, aber sexy. (Poor, but sexy.)

I spent four months in Berlin in 2008, and never once did I think of it as “being imperial”. Being grungy is more like it. The most imperial thing in Berlin is the Reichstag, which, after it was wrapped by Christo, was topped by Norman Foster with a transparent dome and opened to the public in as non-threatening and enjoyable a manner as he possibly could. Can Berliners be rude? Yes. But not in an imperial way, more in a sullen way.

Berlin has celebrated mainly itself since the wall went up, and even more so since the wall came down. It was always exceptional in many ways, being divided into quarters given to each of the Allied powers, and being a domicile of choice for young West Germans looking to avoid military service. With the exception of a flurry of construction activity in the early 90s, money has never had much interest in Berlin: it’s much more famous for the Love Parade.

Neither Berliners nor the rest of Germany consider the capital to be particularly German. Instead, it’s a historical anomaly, most of which was literally walled off from the rest of the world for 30 years, and all of which remains a very long way from any other major city. When you’re in Berlin, with its dearth of high-speed rail lines, you don’t feel particularly connected to the rest of Europe: instead, you feel the freedom associated with being distant from the concerns of others. I love the city, and I send it all my love on this special day. Long may it retain its singular character.

The GAO reports on the TSA. File under “why doesn’t this surprise me”:

TSA lacks assurance that its investments in screening technologies address the highest priority security needs at airport passenger checkpoints. Since TSA’s creation, 10 passenger screening technologies have been in various phases of research, development, test and evaluation, procurement, and deployment, but TSA has not deployed any of these technologies to airports nationwide… Deployment has been initiated for four technologies–the ETP in January 2006, and the advanced technology systems, a cast and prosthesis scanner, and a bottled liquids scanner in 2008… in the case of the ETP, although TSA tested earlier models, the models ultimately chosen were not operationally tested before they were deployed to ensure they demonstrated effective performance in an operational environment. Without operationally testing technologies prior to deployment, TSA does not have reasonable assurance that technologies will perform as intended.

(Via Fallows)

John Reed wasn’t even on the list of people who I thought should apologize for their role in creating the bubble which led to the financial crisis. But good for him for doing so:

John S. Reed, who helped engineer the merger that created Citigroup Inc., apologized for his role in building a company that has taken $45 billion in direct U.S. aid and said banks that big should be divided into separate parts.

“I’m sorry,” Reed, 70, said in an interview yesterday. “These are people I love and care about. You could imagine emotionally it’s not easy to see what’s happened.”

Reed is a bit like Gerry Levin, looking back on a merger gone horribly wrong; it’s understandable that he has many regrets and might be more prone to apology. But still, it’s a start. Sandy? You’re up next!

We’re less than two months from a New Year’s where a 9 ticks over into a 0, and so that means all manner of decade retrospectives. (And still we haven’t come up with a name for this decade!) Fortune is getting into the game early, naming Steve Jobs its CEO of the decade, for his work at Apple.

What’s more interesting to me is the list of 12 “also-rans” for the title: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Warren Buffett, Bernie Madoff, Carlos Slim, Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Andy Fastow, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Alan Greenspan, and Martha Stewart. Five of the 12 aren’t CEOs at all (Page, Brin, Skilling, Fastow, Greenspan); and not a single one of the 12 is a CEO who was hired to run a company by its board of directors.

Jobs, by contrast, is such a CEO, in a manner of speaking: although he did found Apple, he sold all his shares when he was ousted in the 80s, and was hired back by Apple’s board. (As a result, he’s made more money from Pixar than he has from Apple.)

It’s natural for company founders to give themselves the CEO job. But how come all of Fortune’s top CEOs seem to be founders, and none of them are in the much more common position of having been hired, by the board, to run the company?

How many people, when looking at a wine list, would spend $80 on a timorasso, or $90 for sagrantino? (No, I’ve never heard of them either.) According to Stephen Mancini, the 28-year-old wine director for Union Square Cafe, as channeled by Ryan Flinn, it’s a sizeable number: “drinkers are apt to try something they’ve never heard of if it’s less than $100″.

It’s good news that wine drinkers and restaurant goers are adventurous, of course. But is $100 really a “worth a try to see what it’s like” price point these days?

Something smells very fishy to me about this chart in today’s WSJ:

How can fees be going down as a percentage of transactions if they’ve been rising sharply in nominal terms? The total amount of goods bought on plastic isn’t rising that fast. The WSJ doesn’t help answer the question, preferring instead a simple he-said she-said:

Debit cards carry lower interchange fees than credit cards, but fees on those cards are rising as debit cards become more popular.

Merchants in the U.S. paid an average interchange rate of 1.82% per transaction last year, down from 1.93% in 2005, according to the Nilson Report, bolstering the industry’s argument that fees are falling.

Huh? In once sentence we’re told that fees are rising, while in the next we’re told that fees are falling. Not helpful, WSJ.

The answer, I think, is that the second chart is rather misleading. Consider a world where:

• Credit-card fees are higher than debit-card fees, and are rising.
• Debit card fees are also rising.
• Debit card usage is rising, while some things which used to be bought on credit cards are now bought on debit cards.

I suspect this is exactly what we’re seeing in the chart above. The “falling fees” chart is really just a chart showing that people are moving from credit cards to debit cards. (And remember that debit cards don’t come with cash-back rebates, or loyalty miles, or anything like the amount of purchaser protection that credit cards offer, all of which things are paid for by interchange fees.) Fees are rising across the board, but the secular move into the world of debit cards, which were all but nonexistent a few years ago, allows the industry to claim that fees overall are falling.

I’m waiting to hear from David Robertson of Nilson Report, and I hope he’ll be able to give me some more figures on all this. But my gut feeling is that the second of the WSJ’s charts obscures much more than it reveals.

Bill Radke is some kind of genius. Whose bright idea was it that news should be delivered in prose, anyway? This poetry thing is seriously disruptive technology.

Marketplace Minute 10/16/09 from Marketplace on Vimeo.