There's an ugly graph on zerohedge.com charting the average length of time spent on unemployment dating back to 1950. The record low was a little over 7 months back in Sept. '53. As of September '09 it has hit a record six months. It is worth noting that the long term trend is for unemployment to last for longer and longer stretches, but it has really dragged out during our current Great Recession. Another dubious record set.

Oh, and did you get a gander at what Lord Asshat of Goldman Sachs International said about bonuses and inequality?

How's the hip? Hope your operation went well.

Here's a link to Lord Asshat:

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Looks like unadulterated Thatcherism. More trickle down nostrums which promised prosperity for all and didn't work in the 1980s or 2000s and won't work now. The lord looks like a thug; he's got a mean visage with a crooked mouth. So he issues threats in addition to his 'pie in the sky bye and bye'

Griffiths said that many banks would relocate abroad if the government cracked down on bonus culture. "If we said we're not going to have as big bonuses or the same bonuses as last year, I think then you'd find that lots of City firms could easily hive off their operations to Switzerland or the far east," he said.

Lord Griffiths's comments at the St Paul's Institute talk made my blood boil. I simply cannot appreciate what the rest of us gain from hosting bankers whose reckless activities precipitate the most severe downturn in decades whilst insisting that they deserve enormous bonuses that scarcely reflect any contribution to social value. As far as I can tell, they pay themselves bonuses to continue holding the international financial architecture at ransom, and leave the costs of huge bailouts and financial assurances to other people's children and grandchildren.

Whenever I think that perhaps I might be among the first to be shot when the revolution comes, I have only to think that the mob will have bankers (and MPs) more sharply in their sights. And they won't care that Griffiths's grandfathers were miners and that he claims to know anything about inequality -- and rightly so, since small inequalities might create incentives, but large inequalities are just taking the piss.

Welcome back.

Yes; the bankers are overpaid. But in new ventures, they often draw money to worthless things. Hence they "deserve" most of it because without them nobody would put in a farthing. And they have to pretend wealth and probity until caught, which is rare.

However, this thing was contained under Glass-Steagall, which was overturned by Phil Gramm and his crowd of pious idiots. Even worse, the Community Organ(izer) doesn't know enough to try righting the ship. Volcker is getting short shrift

Was that supposed to say 7 weeks?

It is the only way it makes sense to me....

I've been waiting for someone to question this point. I can't figure it out at all.

Anaesthesia afterglow??