What will become of the European Union? One road leads to the full break-up of the euro, with all its economic and political repercussions. The other involves an unprecedented transfer of wealth across Europe’s borders and, in return, a corresponding surrender of sovereignty. Separate or superstate: those seem to be the alternatives now.

For two crisis-plagued years Europe’s leaders have run away from this choice. They say that they want to keep the euro intact””except, perhaps, for Greece. But northern European creditors, led by Germany, will not pay out enough to assure the euro’s survival, and southern European debtors increasingly resent foreigners telling them how to run their lives.

This has become a test of over 60 years of European integration….

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The basic problem is that many people won’t keep their euros in a Greek bank, and perhaps not in a Spanish bank, either, when those euros can be moved to Germany or some other haven.

Yet German citizens do not appear ready to guarantee Spanish banks or, by extension, the whole credit system of Spain and the other periphery nations. Guarantees of that scope are probably impossible and may also require constitutional changes in some nations.

We thus face the danger that the euro, the world’s No. 2 reserve currency, could implode. Such an event wouldn’t be just another depreciation or collapse of a currency peg; instead, it would mean that one of the world’s major economic units doesn’t work as currently constituted.

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Facebook Inc.’s initial public offering, plagued by trading errors and a 16 percent drop in the share price, will push more individual investors out of a stock market they already distrust after the financial crisis.

“This is clearly the latest in a long string of events that is eviscerating the confidence investors have in the market,” said Andrew Stoltmann, a Chicago attorney who represents retail investors. “The perception is Wall Street jiggered this IPO so the underwriters made money, Facebook executives made money and the small investor got left holding the bag.”

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Ángel de la Peña, a Spanish government worker, is seriously considering the once unthinkable: converting some of his savings from euros to British pounds.

Alvaro Saavedra Lopez, a senior executive for I.B.M. in Spain, says many of his corporate counterparts across the country are similarly looking for safer havens by transferring their spare cash to stronger euro zone countries like Germany “on a daily basis.”

It is only a trickle so far, and not nearly enough to constitute a classic bank run. But these growing transfers of deposits out of troubled Spanish banks reflect a broader fear that the country’s problems could make it hard for Spaniards to get to their money if banks fail and cannot be supported by the government. In a worst case, some even worry their money will be worth substantially less if Spain is forced to leave the euro currency zone and re-adopt its old currency, the peseta.

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A Senate panel expressed its outrage Thursday over Pakistan’s conviction of a doctor who helped the United States track down Osama bin Laden, voting to cut aid to Islamabad by $33 million ”” $1 million for every year of the physician’s 33-year sentence for high treason.

The punitive move came on top of deep reductions the Appropriations Committee already had made to President Barack Obama’s budget request for Pakistan, a reflection of the growing congressional anger over its cooperation in combatting terrorism. The overall foreign aid budget for next year had slashed more than half of the proposed assistance and threatened further reductions if Islamabad failed to open overland supply routes to U.S.-led NATO forces in Afghanistan.

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New signs of a global slowdown are darkening the economic outlook.

On Thursday, measures of business sentiment in Europe slipped and reports from purchasing managers at manufacturers around the world turned down. Among them, China, the world’s second-largest economy, registered its seventh-straight drop in an important index of manufacturing activity. The U.S. reported that businesses were slowing their orders of computers, aircraft, fabricated metals and other durable goods.

With the latest reports, a new worry is emerging among economists and policy makers: that economic activity is slowing in sync around the globe and not just in a few markets with their own isolated problems. Europe””struggling with the risk of a Greek pullout from the euro area and broader fiscal problems””is the epicenter of global economic concerns right now. But reports of economic trouble are turning up in India, South Africa, Brazil and elsewhere.

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With Greece’s membership in the euro zone teetering, fears of bank insolvency rising and Europe’s leaders bickering about what to do, the euro crisis is once again intensifying and threatening to undermine fragile growth globally.

At a summit meeting in Brussels on Wednesday, regional leaders failed to signal any significant new steps to stimulate the sputtering regional economy or resolve the competing agendas of President François Hollande of France, who favors stronger action to spur growth, and his German counterpart, Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has opposed aggressive moves to ease the pressure on Europe’s weakest economies.

Yet, the urgency for a solution to the region’s debt crisis, now in its third year, may never have been greater.

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Baby-boomer retirements are skewing the nation’s unemployment rate, but not enough to disguise a weak economy, according to a new report.

The left-leaning Employment Policy Institute (EPI) says the slow exit of baby boomers is a factor in the declining jobless rate, and its overall conclusion is that the economy is still quite sick.

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If you’re in the market for a property filled with colorful stained glass windows, decorative mahogany wood, plenty of reading materials and an entertainment center, Steven Metcalfe has got just the thing.

St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, which closed for services in August 2009, is up for sale.

“We would love for somebody to come in and operate a church here. We’re open to whoever can see the possibilities,” the Rev. Metcalfe said Tuesday at the South Main Street site.

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[Amber] Cooper had a liver transplant when she was 10. She takes a drug twice a day so her body won’t reject her liver.

“Every year my company changes the insurance. And instead of giving us three different choices for insurance plans, they were changing to one, which was a high-deductible plan with no prescription coverage,” she said.

Cooper was stunned. Her anti-rejection medicine costs way more than she could afford on her own ”” more than $1,000 a month.

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The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said Tuesday that unless lawmakers act to prevent scheduled tax increases and spending cuts at the end of the year, a recession will likely result in early 2013.

Early next year income taxes are set to go up when the Bush-era tax rates expire. Automatic spending cuts totaling roughly $109 billion triggered by last August’s debt-ceiling deal are set to hit. Meanwhile, payments to physicians under Medicare will be slashed.

CBO projects that these and other elements of the so-called “fiscal cliff” will cause the economy to contract as demand dries up.

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg changed his status to “married” Saturday and received over one million “likes” from his followers. But the site he founded isn’t always so marriage-friendly. In fact, lawyers say the social network contributes to an increasing number of marriage breakups.

More than a third of divorce filings last year contained the word Facebook, according to a U.K. survey by Divorce Online, a legal services firm. And over 80% of U.S. divorce attorneys say they’ve seen a rise in the number of cases using social networking, according to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. “I see Facebook issues breaking up marriages all the time,” says Gary Traystman, a divorce attorney in New London, Conn. Of the 15 cases he handles per year where computer history, texts and emails are admitted as evidence, 60% exclusively involve Facebook.

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The 17-country eurozone risks falling into a “severe recession,” the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned on Tuesday, as it called on governments and Europe’s central bank to act quickly to keep the slowdown from dragging down the global economy.

OECD Chief Economist Pier Carlo Padoan warned the eurozone economy could contract by as much as 2% this year, a figure that the Paris-based organization had laid out as its worst-case scenario in November.

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…I do think that it would ultimately be better if the eurozone broke up. This might not involve a complete reversion to national currencies. A hard core of euro-users, centred on Germany, might survive. But the current euro will have to go.
It is true that the transition from here to there will be painful and dangerous. My colleague Martin Wolf laid out an updated version of the full horror scenario in Friday’s FT ”“ involving a breakdown of law and order in Greece, and financial collapse across Europe. How could anyone responsibly run that risk?

The answer is that the alternatives to eurozone break-up are inherently implausible and deeply unattractive.At the weekend G8 leaders called for Greece to stay in the eurozone. Their present plan seems to involve some magical mix of stimulus and austerity that restores both budgetary balance and growth. But even if they can agree a real plan and even if it works ”“ and neither outcome is likely ”“ the eurozone’s structural problems would remain…..

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In 2011 North Carolina’s legislature voted to eliminate all funding for chaplains serving correctional institutions. According to Gary Friedman of the American Correctional Chaplains Organization, North Carolina later restored 33 percent of the funding, but it was still a drastic cut. Similar proposals are pending in other state legislatures. Some are cutting funding immediately; others are simply not replacing chaplains when they die or retire. One state’s commissioner of corrections recently told a statewide chaplains’ conference: “I am mandated to secure, educate, and medicate””religion is not an essential part of that mandate.” Friedman reports that New York State has seen its corps of prison chaplains reduced by nearly 50 percent over the past two years because of a hiring freeze. He pointed out that the hiring freezes have also cut into the remaining chaplains’ support staff””their administrative assistants and volunteer coordinators””which has left the chaplains themselves with more paperwork to do and less time for religious services and counseling.

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The immediate future of the global economy, including Australia, now depends on Europe, and whether it can restore confidence to markets. If European leaders can resolve their tangle of problems, growth is ahead of us. If they can’t, all bets are off.

Pessimism comes more naturally than optimism. It is now five years since we first heard the phrase ”the sub-prime crisis”, which rang the end of a golden era of debt-financed growth. Since then, we’ve had years of recurring crises, summits and resolutions that promised to solve the problems, but haven’t.

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Most states are still more than two years away from returning to prerecession employment levels, according to a new analysis.

Only four states ”” Alaska, North Dakota, Texas, and Louisiana ”” have created enough jobs since the recovery to get back to where they were prior to the recession, according to economist Steven Frable of IHS Global Insight. All four of those states have benefited from an energy boom, and Louisiana was starting at a low level of employment after taking a major hit from Hurricane Katrina.

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Facebook Inc.took eight years to stage one of the most anticipated initial public offerings ever. The anticlimax came Friday, as Wall Street bankers struggled to prevent the newly minted stock from ending its first day with a loss.

he stock had been widely predicted to soar on its first day. Instead, up until the closing moments of the trading session, Facebook’s underwriters battled to keep the stock from slipping below its offering price of $38 a share. Such a stumble would have been a significant embarrassment, particularly for a prominent new issue like Facebook, the most heavily traded IPO of all time.

In the end, the bankers succeeded. When trading on Nasdaq ended at 4 p.m., the social network’s stock was up just a hair, 0.6%, at $38.23.

The roller-coaster day””Facebook’s shares started out jumping roughly 11%, before cooling off””was also beset by trading glitches and a 30-minute delay in the opening of trading. Nasdaq OMX Group Inc.didn’t respond to requests for comment.

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The leaders of the Group of 8, emphasizing growth as well as fiscal discipline at their meeting on Saturday, made a strong plea for Greece to stay in the euro zone and the European Union.

And no wonder.

Despite efforts at official reassurance, no one really knows the consequences of a Greek exit from the euro zone, or how rapidly big countries like Spain and Italy, and their banks, will feel the effects….

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The summit of the G8 group of major world economies is under way at Camp David, near Washington, with Europe’s debt crisis expected to dominate.

US President Barack Obama said all the G8 nations were “absolutely committed” to the goals of growth, stability and fiscal consolidation.

Germany, which backs austerity, is under pressure from the US and France for stimulus measures, analysts say.

Greece’s possible exit from the eurozone is high on the agenda.

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Like the single market before, …[the Euro] was conceived primarily as glue to bind Europe more closely together, tie Germany’s prosperity to that of its neighbors and prevent a third world war from the Continent, which had brought us two. A few engineering flaws wouldn’t be allowed to get in the way of such an important project.

A little over a decade since the first euro bills hit the shops in Madrid and Berlin, the euro’s design flaws have pushed much of the European Union into a deep economic pit. And political imperative is again being deployed as a major reason to stick to the common currency. “This enormously important motivation is often underestimated by outsiders,” argued the Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, the most sober analyst of Europe’s economic maelstrom….
The main problem is that while leaders eagerly embraced the monetary bond, they rejected its necessary complement: a central budget that would transfer money from successful regions to underperforming ones, as the United States government sends tax dollars collected in Massachusetts to pay for unemployment benefits in Nevada.

The euro fed the illusion that Greece, Spain and Italy were as creditworthy as Germany or the Netherlands, propelling a decade-long credit boom in Europe’s less-developed periphery. And it was spectacularly ill-designed to deal with the shock when capital flows to those nations suddenly stopped. Weak countries not only had to rely on their own devices; they had to do so without a currency or a monetary policy of their own to absorb the blow….

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Homeward bound after the Trojan War, Odysseus of Greek myth had to pick a path through seas harboring a monster with six heads and a whirlpool that digested ships whole. Now, whether modern Greece exits the euro ”” potentially triggering global economic turmoil in the process ”” depends on the tough choices of Ivi Moreti and her 11 million countrymen.

Should the 60-year-old widow leave her nest egg of euros in a wobbly Greek bank and risk it being seized and converted into a devalued national currency? Or should she withdraw it all, joining what could become a panic forcing Greece out of the euro anyway by bringing down the financial system?

Who should she vote for June 17, when this nation mired in political chaos holds its second election in two months? A party willing to largely accept the crippling bailout conditions that have taken a bite out of her pension and run the economy into the ground? Or the rising rebels promising to buck the austerity imposed on Greece by its bigger neighbors, , a course that might cause total economic collapse?

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Brussels is preparing plans for Greece to quit the euro, a senior official has revealed, as analysts warned that the country’s exit would cost European taxpayers at least €225bn (£180bn).

European Union trade commissioner Karel De Gucht said that both the European Commission and the European Central Bank (ECB) were working behind the scenes on contingency plans for a break-up.

“Today there are in the European Central Bank, as well as in the Commission, services working on emergency scenarios if Greece shouldn’t make it. A Greek exit does not mean the end of the euro, as some claim,” he said.

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As Spain’s recession deepens, more workers like Juan are being shunted into an underground economy that amounts to as much as a fifth of Spain’s gross domestic product, according to some estimates, with broad implications as the country tries to revive itself, reform its labor market and keep at bay the kind of wrenching crisis that now threatens to push Greece out of the euro zone.

The happy news is that the size of the underground economy means that more Spaniards are working than it might seem, and that the official unemployment figure of 24.4 percent ”” the highest in Europe ”” may be overstated by as much as five to nine percentage points, economists say. That has given the Spanish government an important safety valve.

“Without the underground economy, we would be in a situation of probably violent social unrest,” said Robert Tornabell, a professor and former dean of the Esade business school in Barcelona.

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There could be immediate risks to the Spanish and Italian economies: Tens of billions of dollars have left those nations in recent months as investors doubt their ability to both control rising public debt and boost their economies from recession. A Greek departure from the euro would, officials and analysts fear, push the lack of confidence in the euro zone to another level, accelerate that capital flight and leave one or both nations close to economic collapse.

It is a pattern reminiscent of what happened in Latin America and Asia in the 1990s, and it is the most likely way that a Greek exit from the euro could ignite a global round of financial contagion. The risks were highlighted Thursday when the Moody’s rating agency cut its assessment of Spanish banks, saying it had less confidence in the ability of the Spanish government to support the country’s financial system.

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French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who held their first meeting yesterday, might want to consider that they have been attacking the problems of Greece, the euro, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and even France backwards.

All the talk and all the effort has been aimed at keeping Greece and the others in the euro. But the real, ideal solution is to get Germany out.

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The head of Greece’s radical left party””throwing down a gauntlet that could increase tensions between Greece and its frustrated European creditors””said he sees little chance Europe will cut off funding to the country but that if it does, Athens will stop paying its debts.

A financial collapse in Greece would drag down the rest of the euro zone, said Alexis Tsipras, the 37-year-old head of the Coalition of the Radical Left, known as Syriza, and potentially the country’s next prime minister. Instead, he said, Europe must consider a more growth-oriented policy to arrest Greece’s spiraling recession and address what he called a growing “humanitarian crisis” facing the country.

“Our first choice is to convince our European partners that, in their own interest, financing must not be stopped,” Mr. Tsipras said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. He said Greece doesn’t intend to take any unilateral action, “but if they proceed with unilateral action on their side, in other words they cut off our funding, then we will be forced to stop paying our creditors, to go to a suspension in payments to our creditors.”

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When Red Robin Gourmet Burgers introduced its new Tavern Double burger line last month, the company had to get everything right. So it turned to social media.

The 460-restaurant chain used an internal social network that resembles Facebook to teach its managers everything from the recipes to the best, fastest way to make them. Instead of mailing out spiral-bound books, getting feedback during executives’ sporadic store visits and taking six months to act on advice from the trenches, the network’s freewheeling discussion and video produced results in days. Red Robin is already kitchen-testing recipe tweaks based on customer feedback ”” and the four new sandwiches just hit the table April 30.

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