It’s a teachable moment, but what’s the right lesson? Already, the $2 billion-plus trading debacle at JPMorgan Chase has inspired a powerful storyline. Nothing has changed since the financial crisis, it’s said. Big banks remain out of control, gambling recklessly. If Jamie Dimon’s bank, reputed to be one of the best-managed, can get into trouble, what can we expect of the others? Government regulations and regulators need to be tougher to counteract bankers’ greed and incompetence.

The storyline is marred only by this: Everything in it is exaggerated, misleading or wrong.

Let’s take stock. Here are four propositions that defy conventional wisdom.

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There is a revolution taking place in the way traditional congregations hire, manage and compensate their staff. Some of it is healthy and overdue, some of it is painful and short-sighted.

As traditional congregations entered the 21st century, they walked into a perfect storm of factors negatively impacting staffing. Attractional, programmatic congregational life was waning in many settings. Missional leadership required a set of skills and a mentality that was foreign to those who had been trained and taught in another era. The Great Recession put unprecedented strain on church operating budgets. Scapegoating among congregational leaders seeking to explain a suddenly clear pattern of plateau and decline became the norm.

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Google has revamped its search engine in an attempt to offer instant answers to search questions.

A new function, the Knowledge Graph, will make the site’s algorithms act “more human”, the site said in a blog post.

The feature will at first be available to US-based users, but will be rolled out globally in due course.

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The pro-gambling lobby…remains undeterred. As one example, the Poker Players Alliance spent $1.4 million last year lobbying Washington power brokers in support of Internet gambling initiatives such as Rep. [Joe] Barton’s bill, the Roll Call newspaper reported. This alliance, along with multiplied other gambling special interest groups, shows no intention of stepping away from the table this year, either.

No doubt there is money to be made in legalized online poker gambling. The gambling purveyors would rake in additional billions each year. According to the Barton bill, the government would collect “substantial revenue.” And a relative few players among millions would survive in the black, at least for a time.

But is there a greater price to be paid? The losers would far outnumber the winners.

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In 2011, regional president Francisco Camps announced that the [Valencia’s The City of Arts and Sciences] complex had brought in some 40 million tourists since it opened, and the complex has indeed become the most readily identifiable sign of the city. But visibility alone does not mean success, especially in times of economic crisis. The Valencia project came in four times over its original budget, and its final unit was not completed until 2005.

And it’s hardly alone. The Oscar Niemeyer International Cultural Center, a massive exhibition and performance space designed by the Brasilian architect for the northern Spanish port city of Avilés, ceased programming less than a year after it was inaugurated in March 2011. After decades of planning, Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain finally inaugurated its City of Culture, a Peter Eisenman campus, containing a museum, a library and a performance space, in January 2011. Yet the eventual $500 million spent wasn’t even enough to finish the complex: the city ran out of money before completing two of the six planned buildings. “The crisis hit, and they didn’t have any choice,” says Anxo Lugilde, Galicia correspondent for La Vanguardia newspaper. “They had to stop construction.”

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A senior Greek Protestant has warned that minority denominations “face disaster” due to the country’s worsening economic crisis.

“Heavy taxation, high unemployment and all our other difficulties are fast-forwarding us to collapse,” said Dimitrios Boukis, general secretary of the Greek Evangelical church, which has 29 congregations in two regional synods in Greece and other communities abroad.

“We receive no state support and are fully dependent on our members, and we’re already short of pastors because we can’t afford them. The pastors we have are having to handle everything because we can’t employ staff, so some congregations will end up without any spiritual care.”

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There would be massive global pressure on Europe to handle the exit in a grown-up fashion, with backstops in place to stabilize Greece. The IMF would step in.

The German finance ministry is already drawing up such plans, and quite correctly so (unfortunately roping in the British too to spread the losses, which is a thorny subject).

Needless to say, the real danger is contagion to Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Belgium, France, and the deadly linkages between €15 trillion in public and private debt in these countries and the €27 trillion European banking nexus.

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Defense contractors have slowed hiring. Tax advisers are warning firms not to count on favorite breaks. And hospitals are scouring their books for ways to cut costs.

Across the U.S. economy, anxiety is rising about the potential for widespread disruptions after the November election, when a lame-duck Congress will have barely two months to resolve a grinding standoff over taxes and spending.

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Greece may be forced to leave the euro if the country refuses to implement spending cuts agreed with the European Union, Angela Merkel warned.

Raising the spectre of a Greek exit, the German chancellor said “solidarity for the euro” was threatened by the ongoing political crisis in Athens.

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The euro crisis is entering its final stages. Economic pain is now interacting with political resistance to produce intense financial pressure. I expect Greece to leave the euro ”“ and perhaps very soon.

It could happen voluntarily, but both the Greek people and Greek politicians are still clinging to the idea that they can put an end to austerity yet still stay in the euro. In order to try to achieve that, a new government may call the eurozone’s bluff.

At that point, the other eurozone members would face an awkward choice. Doubtless there would be voices in favour of providing the money, willy nilly. That might well be the French position. But if the eurozone gives way on this, what chance would there be of painful austerity being continued, not just in Greece but also in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Ireland? The northern countries would face the prospect of pouring money into a bottomless pit.

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Parents are angry and Roseville City School District officials have plans to sue after St. John’s School trustees announced the small private school is broke and will close at the end of the month.

The 32-year-old Episcopal school is more than a half million dollars in debt, including owing more than $170,000 to the Roseville school district for leasing the Barbara Chilton Middle School campus.

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One out of five families owes more on credit cards, medical bills, student loans and other unsecured debt than they have in savings, according to a new University of Michigan report. And the number of families surveyed at the end of 2011 that have no savings at all increased to 23.4%, compared with 18.5% in 2009.

“The people who were down and out, without much money, in the recession have ended up staying there or even worse,” says Frank Stafford, professor of economics at University of Michigan Institute for Social Research and co-author of the report.

And the mortgage crisis is not over.

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Speaking exclusively to The Sunday Telegraph, Theodoros Pangalos said he was “very much afraid of what is going to happen” after Greek voters rejected the deal in elections last Sunday.

“The majority of the people voted for a very strange mental construction,” he said. “We want to be in the EU and the euro, but we don’t want to pay anything for the past.”

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California is facing a much deeper budget deficit than expected due to weak tax revenues and slow progress in cutting budgets, Governor Jerry Brown said on Saturday.

Brown said the shortfall for the fiscal year ending on June 30 now stood at $16 billion, up from a previous estimate of $9.2 billion made in January.

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Congressional lawmakers seem to agree on two things: College student loan debt is out of control and something should be done about it.

Where they disagree is how to solve the problem. Currently they are looking at one piece of this puzzle: how to keep a lower interest rate on federally subsidized undergraduate student loans for low- and middle-income students which is set to double to 6.8 percent this June.

Isaiah Toney, a senior at George Washington University in Washington, said he is “extraordinarily happy” this issue is being raised, but he thinks the discussion has been too narrow.

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Kelsey Griffith graduates on Sunday from Ohio Northern University. To start paying off her $120,000 in student debt, she is already working two restaurant jobs and will soon give up her apartment here to live with her parents. Her mother, who co-signed on the loans, is taking out a life insurance policy on her daughter.

“If anything ever happened, God forbid, that is my debt also,” said Ms. Griffith’s mother, Marlene Griffith.

Ms. Griffith, 23, wouldn’t seem a perfect financial fit for a college that costs nearly $50,000 a year. Her father, a paramedic, and mother, a preschool teacher, have modest incomes, and she has four sisters. But when she visited Ohio Northern, she was won over by faculty and admissions staff members who urge students to pursue their dreams rather than obsess on the sticker price.

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The chief danger is not for Greece. It is for the rest of the eurozone. If the German political establishment is unwise enough to force Greece out of EMU on the assumption that the country is a special case, it will be disabused of this illusion very quickly.

Total debt levels are 100pc of GDP higher in Portugal, and the country has roughly the same current account deficit. The only difference is that Portugal began its austerity death cure later and has not yet had time to enter into the full vortex of debt-deflation and collapse. Give it a few more months.

Spain and Italy are 20pc overvalued against northern Europe….

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That the losses would only dent the quarterly profits at one of the world’s largest banks, and that they were revealed by the bank’s own management, did not diminish the chorus on Capitol Hill for tighter controls. The charismatic and often outspoken Dimon, who has argued rigorously against strict financial regulations, fielded calls Friday from several lawmakers and regulators at the bank’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters.

The biggest blow-up between Wall Street and Washington since 2010, when Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act to tighten oversight of the financial industry, comes just as regulators are drafting new rules governing banks. A signature feature of the law is the Volcker Rule, a prohibition on banks engaging in speculative bets. The authors of the act say the measure might have prevented JPMorgan’s bad trades had it been in effect.

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J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. told traders several months ago to make bets aimed at shielding the bank from the market fallout of Europe’s deepening mess. But instead of shrinking the risk, their complicated bets backfired into losses of as much as $200 million a day in late April and early May, people familiar with the situation said.

Regulators in the U.S. and U.K. are examining what went wrong, who is responsible and whether J.P. Morgan should have told investors about the losses sooner, according to people familiar with the matter.

While attention has focused on large positions taken by a trader nicknamed “the London whale,” he and other traders were carrying out instructions from a bank executive, these people said.

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Some parents are not content to help pay the bills. They’re going to great lengths to help Junior get a job.

According to Adecco, nearly a third of parents are helping their kids find work, and nearly one in ten are taking them to job interviews.

But that’s not all.

Three percent of recent college grads say their parents have actually sat in with them during interviews, and one percent claim Mom or Dad wrote their thank you notes afterwards.

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A statement posted on the Occupy London website on Tuesday said that there would be a “teach-in” at 1 p.m. on Saturday at St Paul’s, “organised by Tent City University, the educational arm of Occupy London. It is aiming at promoting informed political action and exploring viable economic alternatives before we pay a visit to City institutions that caused and continue to profit by the [financial] crisis.”

It said that the global day of action would involve “citizens using peaceful, creative ways to deliver their own messages to the financial and corporate élite of the City”. The protesters would “continue to exercise our right to peacefully assemble in public spaces”.

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As China’s leaders have been preoccupied with a political struggle leading up to a once-in-a-decade leadership change this autumn, there are increasing signs that the Chinese economy may be running into trouble.

China announced Thursday that growth in imports had unexpectedly come to a screeching halt in April ”” rising just 0.3 percent from the same period a year earlier, compared with expectations for an 11 percent increase. Businesses across the country appeared to lose much of their appetite for products as varied as iron ore and computer chips.

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[CEO Jamie] Dimon said the losses were caused by “errors,” “sloppiness” and “bad judgment.”

“This was a unique thing we did,” Dimon said. “Obviously it had a lot of problems. It was a bad strategy. It became more complex, it was poorly managed.”

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Jesus is cracking jokes, sharing parables and dying for our sins in three Broadway musicals this spring, while another six shows feature religious themes that are woven through dialogue and lyrics.

But what many of these productions lack are ticket-buying multitudes who identify themselves as people of faith, a group rarely courted by Broadway producers offering the sort of focused advertising campaigns that turned movies like “The Passion of the Christ” and “The Blind Side” into unexpected hits.

Tom Allen is working to change that. A partner in Allied Faith & Family, a Hollywood marketing firm that aims to attract churchgoers to movies and now theater, Mr. Allen has spent the past 18 months breaking into the cloistered world of Broadway.

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Greece’s political turmoil showed no signs of abating Tuesday as hopes faded that leading political parties can form a coalition government after Sunday’s splintered election result, increasing the possibility that Greeks will be called back to the polls as early as next month.

The inconclusive vote and ensuing coalition talks, combined with concerns about the emergence of a Socialist president in France who opposes German-led austerity measures for the euro zone, has revived speculation that Greece would leave the euro, stoking new worries about the fragility of Europe’s monetary union.

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From here:

They’re lured abroad by visions of prosperity, by hopes for a better future for their kids and families back home. Sometimes, they’re trying to escape war or conflict. They are the some 12 million people around the world today who are believed to have become slaves for those dreams of a better, safer life.
But their number could be even double that ”“ as many as 27 million men, women and children to live in a state of modern slavery. People like Tara from Ethiopia, promised a good job as a maid in the Middle East, who finds her passport confiscated, and 20 hour days of humiliation and hard work. Or Umma from Somalia who spends her last pennies for a boat ride to Italy only to find herself an unwilling victim of the sex trade. Or Noben, a fisherman from Bangladesh beaten by his boss when he fails to meet his quota of catch for the day.
Among the growing number of lay and religious organizations combating these forms of human trafficking, is the Catholic International Union of Superiors General (UISG) which in 2009 instituted the Talitha Kum network to train consecrated religious and lay in methods of prevention and to provide assistance for victims of trafficking.
Salesian Sr. Estrella Castalone of Talitha Kum says the network takes its name from a center for trafficked girls she helps run in her native Philippines.
Through their many hospitals, schools and social centers around the world, Catholic sisters can play an important role in combating and preventing trafficking of persons and offering material, spiritual and psychological help to victims. And in the some 68 countries where it’s located, Talitha Kum is training more and more religious for the job. It’s a job, Sr. Estrella says, “that puts us in touch with all forms of poverty: the material, the spiritual and the moral”¦”

Listen to Tracey McClure’s whole interview with Sr. Estrella.

The Ontario government wants to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to its doctors through fee cuts, fee clawbacks and the elimination of funding for some health-care services, medical groups said Sunday amid an escalating conflict over physician compensation in the province….

“They’re basically trying to trash the medical profession, for reasons that don’t make a lot of sense,” said Ray Foley, executive director of the Ontario Association of Radiologists. “We think it’s going to be devastating. It’s not going to cause an erosion of patient care, it’s going to create a chasm in patient care.”

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Europe is a mess ”” politically, economically, fiscally, economist David Rosenberg said Monday.

“In less than two years, we are now up to a total of seven European leaders or ruling parties that have been forced out of office, courtesy of the spreading government debt crisis ”” tack on France now to Ireland, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. Even Germany’s coalition is looking shaky,” the Gluskin Sheff economist wrote in his note Monday.

“This is quite a potent brew ”” financial insolvency, economic fragility and political instability.”

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General Conference 2012 approved a budget of $603.1 million for seven general church funds during the 2013-2016 period; that total is 6.03 percent less than the amount apportioned for the previous four-year period ”“”“ the first time the assembly has accepted a lower budget than the amount set for the preceding period.

That sounds like a whopping amount, but local churches should not count on huge savings, since only 2 cents out of every dollar in the collection plates goes to support general church ministries. Also, costs of annual conference operations, clergy pension benefits and inflationary costs are likely to increase local church costs.

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Corporate chaplains have been around for more than 50 years, strengthened by a portion of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibits religious discrimination in the workplace. Changes to labor laws in 1972 also included requirements that employers make religious accommodations for employees if they do not substantially interfere with business. By the late 1980s, several national organizations had sprung up to provide chaplains and their counseling services throughout the American business scene.

In recent years, as businesses look at ways to cut costs, some have turned to corporate chaplains as an alternative to more traditional employee assistance programs.

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