Boeing has only been in South Carolina a few years, depending on how you count its ownership interest in suppliers it eventually acquired entirely, but it’s already making its mark on the community.

As it ramps up production of the 787 Dreamliner at its campus next to the Charleston International Airport, it seems the company is also ramping up its giving, especially to area civic events and various health and education initiatives.

Last year, for example, Boeing gave $25,000 to the Trident Technical College Foundation as one of several sponsors of the organization’s ‘A Night in the Valley’ wine dinner and auction. This year, Boeing’s doubled its giving to become the sole presenting sponsor, said Meg Howle, vice president for advancement at the college.

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Perhaps Secretary [Hilda] Solis, in her zeal to bolster U.S. manufacturing, could use her influence in high places to urge an NLRB retreat on this absurd action against Boeing — and on similarly misguided administration pandering to organized labor.

After all, as she writes in her column: “In the Charleston area alone, more than 900 manufacturing jobs have been added since July 2010 — an increase of 4.3 percent.”

In other words, President Obama’s labor secretary is bragging, in part, about jobs added in the Charleston area by Boeing, even as President Obama’s NLRB acting general counsel takes Boeing to court for adding those jobs.

And that, by any logical analysis, doesn’t add up.

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Almighty God, you have so linked our lives one with another that all we do affects, for good or ill, all other lives: So guide us in the work we do, that we may do it not for self alone, but for the common good; and, as we seek a proper return for our own labor, make us mindful of the rightful aspirations of other workers, and arouse our concern for those who are out of work; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The percentage of working-age Californians with jobs has fallen to a record low, and employment may not return to pre-recession levels until the second half of the decade, according to a research group.

Just 55.4 percent of working-age Californians, defined as those 16 or older, had a job in July, down from 56.2 percent a year earlier and the lowest level since 1976, the Sacramento- based California Budget Project said in a report released late yesterday.

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“There is so much inbredness in this profession….They all read the same sources. They all use the same data sets. They all talk to the same people. There is endless extrapolation on extrapolation on extrapolation, and for years that is what has been rewarded.”

—Economist Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland.

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Confined to their hospital beds, patients can only fantasize about stripping off all the wires that connect them to monitors and bolting for the door.

Suppose, however, that all of a convalescent patient’s electrode patches were consolidated into a single, nearly invisible and weightless version ”” as thin as a temporary, press-on tattoo. And suppose that a tiny radio transmitter eliminated the need for any wires tethering the patient to monitoring machines.

“Epidermal electronics” ”” a term coined by researchers who have produced prototype devices at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ”” may enable constant medical monitoring anywhere.

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You can check out the chart here.

Treasuries rose, pushing 10-year note yields below 2 percent, as the government’s payrolls report showed no jobs were added in August, stoking speculation that the Federal Reserve may consider additional stimulus measures to boost the economy.

U.S. 30-year yields fell to the lowest in since January 2009 as U.S. employment data were the weakest reading since September 2010. Minutes of the Federal Reserve’s Aug. 9 meeting released on Aug. 30 showed policy makers will debate stimulus options at their September gathering. German government debt rallied and credit defaults swaps rose, reflecting concern the European debt crisis is worsening.

“The markets were expecting some positive rate of job growth, and with that not materializing, everyone wants the safety of Treasuries,” said Guy LeBas, chief fixed-income strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC in Philadelphia. “The nonexistent job growth has decreased fear of inflation and replaced it with increased fear of recession.”

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In June, 14.6% of the U.S. population relied on food stamps. Food stamp rolls have risen 9.5% in the past year, though recent months show the pace of growth is slowing.

Mississippi reported the largest share of its population relying on food stamps, more than 21%, though that included some disaster assistance. One in five residents in New Mexico, Tennessee and Oregon were also food stamp recipients.

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The nonfarm payrolls numbers were unchanged in August after a prolonged increase in economic anxiety that began with the brinksmanship in Washington’s debt-ceiling debate and was followed by the country’s loss of its triple-A credit rating, stock market whiplash and renewed concerns about Europe’s sovereign debt.

The jobs figure, a monthly statistical snapshot by the Department of Labor, may appear more negative because it does not include 45,000 Verizon workers who were on strike when the survey was taken.

Economists blamed both sluggish demand for goods and services and the heightened uncertainty over the economy’s direction for the slow pace of job creation, saying political deadlock was in effect creating economic paralysis.

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Tax evasion in Greece threatened to take organised form on Thursday when café and restaurant owners refused to pay a 10-point VAT rise, as a deep recession clashes with the government’s increasingly desperate search for revenue.

The steep rise in value added tax on the hospitality sector from 13 per cent to 23 per cent is part of a package of fiscal measures agreed in return for the country’s second financial rescue by European Union partners.

But for many of Greece’s ubiquitous cafés and souvlaki stands, which have already seen a 20-40 per cent decline in business in the past year as customers rein in spending, the VAT rise is the final straw….

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…[This potential] threat came into sharp focus last week, when shaking from the largest earthquake to hit Virginia in 117 years appeared to exceed what the North Anna nuclear power plant northwest of Richmond was built to sustain.

The two North Anna reactors are among 27 in the eastern and central U.S. that a preliminary Nuclear Regulatory Commission review has said may need upgrades. That’s because those plants are more likely to get hit with an earthquake larger than the one their design was based on.

In South Carolina, SCE&G’s V.C. Summer nuclear plant, about 25 miles northwest of Columbia, is among the 27 facilities possibly needing upgrades to better withstand earthquakes, the NRC records show. So are three reactors operated by Duke Energy near Seneca.

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Central banks and official bodies have parked record sums of dollars at the US Federal Reserve for safe-keeping, indicating a clear loss of trust in commercial banks.

Data from the St Louis Fed shows that reserve funds from “official foreign accounts” have doubled since the start of the year, with a dramatic surge since the end of July when the eurozone debt crisis spread to Italy and Spain.

“This shows a pervasive loss of confidence in the European banking system,” said Simon Ward from Henderson Global Investors. “Central banks are worried about the security of their deposits so they are placing the money with the Fed.”

Read it all and take a careful look at that chart.

When President Obama unveils his jobs plan to Congress next week, he’ll have to balance his desire for spending on programs that might stimulate the economy against the nation’s current appetite for cost cutting. We examine the pros, cons and politics of six proposals that might make Obama’s list….

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Another congregation in the Anglican Diocese of Pittsburgh has decided to abandon its building, saying that it couldn’t meet the financial or ecclesiastical demands that the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh made during negotiations for the property.

On Oct. 2 the 104 members of All Saints Church in Penn Hills will begin holding services in nearby Rosedale United Methodist Church….

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Federal Reserve Governor Elizabeth Duke called for government efforts to promote the rental of foreclosed homes, saying a recovery in the U.S. housing market hinges on clearing the backlog of such properties.

“We need to deal with the unprecedented number of loans in or still entering the foreclosure pipeline, the disposition of properties acquired through foreclosure, and the effect of a high percentage of distressed sales on home prices,” Duke said in a speech today in Washington. “We, as a nation, currently have a housing market that is so severely out of balance that it is hampering our economic recovery.”

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Beginning Sept. 1, Hungarians will have to pay a 10 forint (€ 0.37) tax on foods with high fat, sugar and salt content, as well as increased tariffs on soda and alcohol. The expected annual proceeds of €70 million will go toward state health care costs, including those associated with addressing the country’s 18.8 percent obesity rate, which is more than 3 percent higher than the European Union average of 15.5 percent according to a 2010 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In Germany, by comparison, 13.6 percent of adults are obese, with Romania at the bottom of the list with 7.9 percent.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said, “Those who live unhealthily have to contribute more.” In other words, the new law is based on the idea that those whose diets land them in the hospital should help foot the bill, particularly in a country with a health care deficit of €370 million.

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“The crisis is not over. Not just in Europe is it not over, it is also not over in other regions of the world,” he said, adding the United States had an “enormous” debt problem and lacked the structures to get the problem under control.

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The recession of 2007-2009 was by far the most savage economic decline over the time frame of these charts. Prior to the last recession, real GDP hit a new peak within a quarter or two of the official recession end. Per capita real GDP usually lagged a quarter before hitting its post-recession peak; the one exception was in 1990-1991, when the per capita variant required an extra three quarters to set a new peak. Employment has historically been slower to hit new highs following recessions.

The so-called double-dip recession of 1980-1982 had a non-recessionary interlude of four quarters. All three of our indicators hit new peaks within in the second quarter after the first of the double dips. Where are we today? We’re now in the ninth quarter after the last recession. Real GDP is within shouting distance (0.5%) of a new peak. But real GDP per capita is less than halfway from its trough to a new peak, and, twenty-six months after the recession ended, nonfarm employment is only a bit over 20% of the way from its trough to a new peak.

Check out the four charts carefully, especially the second one: Real Per Capita GDP as a Percentage of the Previous Peak.

Continued involvement of the ECB could be stymied by two factors. The first is its own distaste for the job. “The fact that markets are dysfunctional is, in our opinion, the responsibility of governments,” ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet said in Brussels on Monday. “They are issuing their own securities. They have the responsibility for the credibility of their own securities.”

There are also question hanging over the Italian austerity plan that the ECB wanted as the price of its support. On Monday, a proposed tax increase on high earners was ditched and some cuts to local-authority funding were scaled back.

“If Italy can’t deliver austerity, it is going to run into some hard questions from the ECB this year,” Mr. Penn said.

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Operation Hope built a nonprofit powerhouse over the last decade, spinning a stockpile of donations from Wall Street firms into 27 financial education centers across the country.

But the charitable organization’s donor base has retrenched in the wake of the financial crisis. Citigroup’s foundation last year cut its giving 60 percent, to $115,000. The ING Foundation delayed paying its $300,000 commitment to Operation Hope. And the CIT Group, a lender that was once one of the organization’s biggest benefactors, stopped giving altogether.

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If it sometimes seems as if Washington exists in a totally different economic universe from the rest of us, rest assured: it does. According to Gallup, the District of Columbia is the most economically optimistic part of the country.Every day, the polling organization surveys Americans of all income levels about whether they think current economic conditions are good, and whether the economy is getting better. The results of these two questions make up Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index.

The latest index report shows that the District of Columbia is far more confident in the economy than any state, by a long shot. In every state, most residents think the economy is getting worse; in the nation’s capital, fully 60 percent think the economy is getting better.

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In absolute numbers, the total public debt as of Aug. 11 was $9.924 trillion, and the intra-government debt was $4.666 trillion, for a total of $14.587 trillion. That’s well over 300 million times the country’s median household income….

The GDP of the United States was $15.003 trillion at the end of the first quarter in 2011. That makes the public debt equal to 66.1% of GDP and the intra-governmental debt 31.1%. Total debt is now 97.2% of GDP and climbing rapidly.

And it’s the climbing rapidly part that is worrisome, not the debt’s current size relative to GDP. Indeed, the debt has been substantially higher by that measure in earlier times. In 1946, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, it was 129.98% of GDP. But while the debt had increased enormously during the war (it had been 50% of a much smaller GDP in 1940), it did not increase substantially over the next 15 years….

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Internet entrepreneur Nicholas Merrill was working in his Manhattan office when an FBI agent in a trench coat arrived with an envelope.

It was fall 2004, and federal investigators were using new legal authority they had acquired after Sept. 11, 2001. Merrill ran a small Internet service provider with clients including IKEA, Mitsubishi and freelance journalists.

The agent handed Merrill a document called a National Security Letter, which demanded that he turn over detailed records on one of his customers. The letter wasn’t signed by a judge or prosecutor. It instructed him to tell no one….

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[My 79-year-old mother] found more care amid the cauliflowers and cash registers of John Lewis than in the NHS hospital she was admitted to six months ago. Her calls for water and a commode were ignored; so, too, were her attempts at conversation. Worse still, at one point she found herself lying naked on the bed while the two nurses who were sponging her giggled and spoke in Tagalog.

At least she was spared the nurses who wear red tabards emblazoned with the warning “Do Not Disturb”. But thousands of patients in Kent, Derby and Middlesex are not so lucky. Their nurses are donning the “buzz off” tabards during drug rounds. The aim, according to the NHS Trusts that have introduced the uniform, is to prevent those pesky patients from interrupting nurse during her important tasks. She should not have to stop her form-filling and box-ticking to quench some old biddy’s thirst, for goodness’ sake.

This leaves the patient and their worried relatives wondering, whatever next?

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The Turkish government said it would return hundreds of properties that were confiscated from religious minorities by the state or other parties over the years since 1936, and would pay compensation for properties that were seized and later sold.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan made the announcement on Sunday to representatives of more than 150 Christian and Jewish trusts gathered at a dinner he hosted in Istanbul to break the day’s Ramadan fast. The government decree to return the properties, bypassing nationalist opposition in Parliament, was issued late Saturday.

The European Union, which Turkey has applied to join, has pressed the country to ease or eliminate laws and policies that discriminate against non-Muslim religious groups, including restrictions on land ownership….

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As President Barack Obama puts together a new jobs plan to be revealed shortly after Labor Day, he is up against a powerful force, long in the making, that has gone virtually unnoticed in the debate over how to put people back to work: Employers are increasingly giving up on the American man.

If that sounds bleak, it’s because it is. The portion of men who work and their median wages have been eroding since the early 1970s. For decades the impact of this fact was softened in many families by the increasing number of women who went to work and took up the slack. More recently, the housing bubble helped to mask it by boosting the male-dominated construction trades, which employed millions. When real estate ultimately crashed, so did the prospects for many men. The portion of men holding a job””any job, full- or part-time””fell to 63.5 percent in July””hovering stubbornly near the low point of 63.3 percent it reached in December 2009. These are the lowest numbers in statistics going back to 1948. Among the critical category of prime working-age men between 25 and 54, only 81.2 percent held jobs, a barely noticeable improvement from its low point last year””and still well below the depths of the 1982-83 recession, when employment among prime-age men never dropped below 85 percent. To put those numbers in perspective, consider that in 1969, 95 percent of men in their prime working years had a job.

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Battered by a weak economy, the nation’s biggest banks are cutting jobs, consolidating businesses and scrambling for new sources of income in anticipation of a fundamentally altered financial landscape requiring leaner operations….

Even as they cut payrolls, banks are exploring ways to generate revenue that could translate to higher costs for consumers. Among the possibilities are new fees for automatic deductions from checking accounts that pay utility and cable bills, according to people involved in the discussions.

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For the last three years we have been told repeatedly by government officials that funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to large and teetering banks during the credit crisis was necessary to save the financial system, and beneficial to Main Street.

But this has been a hard sell to an increasingly skeptical public. As Henry M. Paulson Jr., the former Treasury secretary, told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission back in May 2010, “I was never able to explain to the American people in a way in which they understood it why these rescues were for them and for their benefit, not for Wall Street.”

The American people were right to question Mr. Paulson’s pitch, as it turns out. And that became clearer than ever last week when Bloomberg News published fresh and disturbing details about the crisis-era bailouts.

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In 2008 the world economy was saved from depression by a bold and co-ordinated plan to shore up banks and counter the slump with fiscal and monetary stimulus. Today there is no boldness (the euro-zone crisis is the epitome of politicians doing too little too late). There is no co-ordination. And, to the extent that policies have a common theme, it is the wrong one: politicians across the rich world are taking too short-term a view of fiscal austerity””a bout of budget-cutting which will only increase the risk of another recession.

It does not have to be this way. Echoing the spirit of 2008, policymakers could adopt a co-ordinated strategy to boost growth. Two priorities stand out. First, a recalibration of fiscal and (in some places) monetary policy. Second, a big push on supply-side reforms, from freeing trade to slashing red tape.

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