It’s fitting and not terribly surprising that a Davos panel on preventing a “Lost Generation” of unemployed youth, at times, devolved into management truisms about flexible work hours and blanket statements about young workers’ love of ethical business practices. There’s nothing wrong, of course, with HR departments tailoring their practices around cliches about young workers.

But ping-pong tables and work-from-home days won’t solve Davos’ biggest problems: increasingly fewer young people will have a chance to enter the Davos set.

The panelists — including Nobel-winning economist Peter Diamond; Awn Khasawneh, the prime minister of Jordan and Maurice Levy the CEO of Publicis — were quick to acknowledge the depth of the global youth unemployment crisis and lament the lack of young people on the dais. Davos did well to put a few of its Young Global Leaders in front row of the audience.

While the International Labour Organization’s Director-General Juan Somavia emphasized the need to re-imagine “the value of work” in society, that kind of thinking seems to underestimate the immediacy of the problem.

Nearly 75 million young people are unemployed globally, the ILO estimates. As Felix Salmon noted late last year, Europe has it particularly bad: one in five young Europeans is unemployed. In America, nearly a third of black youths are unemployed. I’m not quite sure how to hold a Davos panel that has any sense of urgency, but youth unemployment seems worthy of a Panic Panel.

There’s clearly a large educational component to the youth unemployment crisis (education is seemingly the third most commonly used word this year at Davos, just behind “Greece” and “firewall”). But, structural reforms, as Diamond noted, are slow-moving. Getting young workers doing any kind of job, what Keynes called digging holes in the ground, should be one of the Davos man’s first priorities.

In America, where some 18 percent of young people can’t find work, we should absolutely consider a youth stimulus package. Two intriguing ideas suggested by panelists would be a start: a broader campaign offering young workers incentives for a few years of working for the public good (teaching, social work and the like) and a “positive discrimination” campaign that would require companies to hire some percentage of young workers.

If you’ve come to Davos for answers, panels are not the place to start. An hour into the “TIME Davos Debate on Capitalism” there were, by my count, just two or three concrete proposals for creating jobs.

The panel included Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan; Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein; Ben Verwaayen, the CEO of Alcatel-Lucent; Raghuram Rajan, a renowned economist; and Sharran Burrows, the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation.

The focus of the panel wasn’t quite “Is 20th century capitalism failing 21st century society?” Instead, it was most certainly about non-specific change at the margins. Rajan called for better worker training, Burrows wants corporations to invest a portion of their income into job creation and a VC audience member bemoaned the U.S. immigration policy and a lack of skilled workers. Despite a few exchanges between Burrows and Alcaltel’s Verwaayen, there was almost nothing in the way of real debate.

Take the “too big to fail” banks, for example. When asked about the issue, Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan claimed that his bank simply needed to be massive to serve an increasingly global economy:

It was unfortuante that Rajan, one of the most pointed critics of the “too big to fail” problem, didn’t fight back on this. Bank of America, after all, grew to its current size thanks to an almost unprecedented series of domestic bank acquisitions. There was nothing inevitable about this acquisition binge (just ask Ken Lewis), just as there was nothing inevitable about Bank of America’s disastrous Countrywide acquisition. These were capitalists decisions that had crucial consequences for the global economy, led to government bailouts and tarnished the name of, you guessed it, capitalism.

Moynihan’s argument that his bank’s size simply “comes from the economy” and “reflects its excess,” to me, seems like the central argument we should be having about capitalism. In short: what parts of capitalism are socially useful?

Today is a very big day at Goldman Sachs.

It’s bonus season on Wall Street and Goldman’s employees are about to learn their “number,” the annual object of obsession that makes up the bonus portion of their compensation. Depending on the number of zeros attached to that number, Wall Streeters will rejoice, buy big homes or quit in a huff.

In turn, many of us will be instantly disgusted by Wall Street’s pay.

There’s a problem, though, with anger about Wall Streeters’ paychecks: we know almost nothing useful about the way the industry rewards its employees. We know that Wall Street pay is high, and certainly far higher than the median American income, which is a serious problem. A battery of studies have linked Wall Street’s pay practices to skewed incentives, outsized risks and short-termism.

Beyond that, though, talking about Wall Street pay becomes an exercise in gossip.

Here’s a sample of recent reports: Bloomberg, relying on bank sources and pay experts, reports junior bankers won’t see annual guaranteed salary increases this year. The NYT reports executive compensation experts charge $11,000 for an annual report which helps banks determine how much to pay top traders. Andrew Ross Sorkin posited that pay on the Street will actually be higher this year if you compare it to revenue.

But, by far, the most common figure you’ll hear during bonus season is average pay per employee. The WSJ declares: “Average pay at Goldman Sachs: $367,057”. It’s a figure that nearly every news organization bandies about, often without caveats.

By Ryan McCarthy

The news that Business Insider raised approximately $7 million should be great news for those who follow the world of web media. Henry Blodget’s got a flat-out growth story on his hands: his staff of 60 now attracts 12 million visitors a month, according to their internal stats.

But there’s reason to be concerned about what Blodget’s team has sacrificed along the way. It’s worth noting that venture-backed media companies can very much be in a race against time for growth. Investors want a return on their money and, given the economics of web news, that almost always requires exponential growth in uniques and pageviews. (Note: I worked at the Huffington Post from 2009 until mid-2011. The Huffington Post, like many others, has been guilty of “over-aggregating” from source material.)

Take this article, for example, which employs one of the site’s characteristically amusing headlines “IT’S OFFICIAL: The Recession Has Created A New Lost Generation.” The piece was, as of this morning, posted prominently near the top of Business Insider’s home page, but it’s a flat-out rehash of a strong piece by the AP. So far, Business Insider’s piece has attracted 4,600 views, per their stats.

The AP summarizes new Census data, which can be found here, talks to economists and provides very valuable analysis of what this new data says about our economy. Very little of this is readily apparent from the Census news releases, by the way. The AP reporter, Hope Yen, did the hard journalistic work of sussing out these figures.

What does Business Insider’s piece offer? By my count, the piece reprints seven datapoints from the AP’s article. It offers one link to the AP’s piece, and no link to the Census department’s latest release. Nor does it offer any original analysis, context or information It does, however, link to a Business Insider slideshow of “19 scary facts about getting a job in this economy” at the bottom of the page. I have no real idea if Business Insider pays for AP content — I can only assume that if it did they’d simply cut and paste the entire AP article onto their site.

Here’s another example, which got 12,000 views per the site’s stats. Business Insider wrote 112 words on a 182-word TMZ story on a former NFL running back who is now living with his parents. There are two quotes in the original piece, which TMZ says were obtained from court documents. Business Insider reprints both quotes wholesale, then lifts almost every other fact from the original article, including details on the player’s contract and information about his child support obligations.

By Ryan McCarthy

We have a severe shortage of information about a $10.5 trillion market.

Jesse Eisinger has a great column at ProPublica about just how inscrutable bank data is — if you haven’t read it, you should. A short summary: even the simplest of big bank statements amount to “guesswork,” Eisinger writes.

Eisinger’s one of a precious few writers who’ve been frank about the banking industry’s black box of data. Read enough of Eisinger or Bloomberg’s Jonathan Weil, you begin to suspect that if analysts, reporters and executives were to be honest, they’d admit there is no reasonable way for even trained investors to make an accurate judgement on the health of a large bank. Here’s Eisinger (and you can almost feel the strain from reading SEC documents):

Day after day, [banks] push out news releases that run to dozens of pages. They prepare reams of special presentations for investors, the most recent of which from Wells ran to 51 pages, on top of a 41-page news release. The SEC filing from the quarter was 162 pages.

The numbers and presentation differ slightly in all of them and often differ from other banks’ presentations, stirring a struggle among outsiders to compare apples and bananas. No professional admits this publicly, but many investors and analysts privately acknowledge that they can’t fully track the data gushing each quarter from the nation’s banks.

And while bank disclosures are intelligible only for those versed in financial arcana, there’s one indicator of banking system’s health that may be even more inscrutable: mortgage servicing.

Bad mortgages and shoddy foreclosures have cost America’s five biggest banks as much as $66 billion, according to a recent estimate by Bloomberg. Assuming we’d be able to put aside concerns about the legality of foreclosures — and that’s a big if — you’d be hard pressed to find recent and reliable specifics about how our banks are actually dealing with bad loans.

Bank of America Chief Executive Brian Moynihan will undergo the most sensitive investor call of his career tomorrow when he submits to a public grilling from Fairholme Capital founder Bruce Berkowitz, one of the bank’s largest shareholders. Fairholme, which manages about $17 billion in assets, set up the call before the bank’s shares lost one-third of their value last Thursday, Friday and yesterday amid concerns about mounting mortgage-related losses and how the bank may be affected by a worsening economy.

Berkowitz has invited investors to submit questions at askbrian@fairholmefunds.com, but, our Wall Street team led by Jed Horowitz, has come up with some of our own. The answers could shed light on crucial issues such as whether the bank will need to raise more equity—and whether Moynihan can survive.

Below are a few of our questions for Moynihan.

1. How will you raise the $50 billion of capital analysts suspect you need to satisfy new regulatory capital rules when your core businesses are losing profitability in a slowing world economy?

2. Is the bank looking to sell any assets?

What else would you ask Bank of America’s CEO?

Let us know in the comments below.