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Marketplace Scratch Pad

Morning Reading

Scott Jagow Apr 3, 2009

The unemployment rate climbed to 8.5% in March. Another 663,000 people lost their jobs. NPR helps you meet some of them. Other stories and columns of interest:

The “Man-Cession” Worsens (Carpe Diem)
“…the March unemployment rate for men was 9.5% vs. 7.5% for women, and the 2% gap is the highest male-female jobless rate difference is at an all-time historical high.”

Obama’s $163,000 Tax Bomb (WSJ)
“… what of the claim not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000 a year? Even ignoring his large energy taxes, Mr. Obama must reconcile his arithmetic. Every dollar of debt he runs up means that future taxes must be $1 higher in present-value terms. Mr. Obama is going to leave a discounted present-value legacy of $6.5 trillion of additional future taxes, unless he dramatically cuts spending…. Call it a stealth tax increase or ticking tax time-bomb.

G20 Summit: Reasons to be cheerful (VoxEU)
“The G20 summit will not mark a turning point in the path of this crisis; but it provides the strongest reason yet to be less pessimistic about the future. The 29-point communique sets out a clear path for a sustainable recovery and lays down sensible principles to guide the recovery and its aftermath.”

The Jobs Solution (The Nation)
“The right way to earn our way back to long-term prosperity is through stimulus efforts that will help develop, broadly deploy, fairly compensate and, especially, fully employ our human capital, which will always be our greatest source of national wealth.”

Tent cities pose challenges for US census (Financial Times)
“The quality of the US census may be undermined because of rising numbers of people living in garages, tents, basements and motels as the financial crisis deepens, key organisations working with the Census Bureau have warned.”

The Radicalization of Ben Bernanke (Washington Post)
“He is throwing trillions of dollars at the financial crisis. What happens if his gambles don’t pay off?”

Google Should Offer To Buy Twitter For $1 Billion (Clusterstock)
“Twitter is a hell of a lot more relevant to Google’s business than other big Google ideas, such as YouTube or Larry Page’s plan to have Google solve the world’s energy crisis”

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