...

It argued that the pension system's deficit remains too high at 11 percent, compared to a 2.5 percent average in the eurozone, and that too much of a burden has been placed on Greeks currently in work, while existing pensioners have largely been protected.

Judges ordered Mr. Kerviel to pay €1 million to his former employer, overturning a previous ruling which ordering him to pay €4.9 billion to Société Générale.

The ruling is a qualified victory for Mr. Kerviel and a setback for Société Générale, because it establishes that responsibility for the lion's share of the losses ultimately lies with the French lender, not its former employee.

... the French government could reclaim a €2.2 billion tax deduction that the bank received after unwinding Mr. Kerviel's trade and posting a massive loss... Jean Veil, a lawyer for Société Générale, brushed off the idea saying he didn't believe that the government could claim the money back given that the bank hadn't committed a "deliberate" or "excessive" fault.

"There is clearly an execution risk to the capital raising," said one official with knowledge of the rescue attempt, adding that the bank's value, about one ninth the size of the planned 5 billion euro cash call, would be a turn-off for investors.

...

Reopening the question of state support, which had already been explored and dropped because of the losses it requires for bondholders under European bank crisis rules, is politically charged, and would reignite a dispute between Italy and Germany.

Berlin had objected to Rome's efforts to back the struggling bank without imposing a loss on its bondholders, according to another senior official.

Data point after data point document that the goods-based economy in the US is in trouble -- manufacturing, wholesale, retail... nothing is firing on all or even most cylinders.

...

Let's say someone has a good middle-class job that pays $65,000 a year. That job goes away in a changing, disrupted world, and his new full-time job pays $14 per hour -- or about $28,000 per year. That devastated American remains counted as "full-time employed" because he still has full-time work -- although with drastically reduced pay and benefits. He has fallen out of the middle class and is invisible in current reporting.

Oil-producer meetings from Vienna and Paris to Moscow have attempted to reach a consensus before talks in the Algerian capital next week.

...

Stumpf, however, is unlikely to lose his job. Analysts and investors on Wall Street are more forgiving of Stumpf than their Main Street and DC counterparts. Many are pointing to Wells Fargo's "superior" return in the market as reason Stumpf should stick around.

But Stumpf? While he clearly turned a blind eye to the scam for five years until the federal authorities got wind of it, once it became public knowledge outside the bank, he stood up and said he "takes responsibility" for what happened. Not just that. He said he's "accountable" for it. Good man!''

It may also prove to be the definitive crisis of globalized capitalism, the demise of the liberal free-market orthodoxies promoted for almost forty years by the Bretton Woods institutions, the OECD, and the Davos fraternity.

...

We know already that the poisonous side-effect of zero rates and quantitative easing in the US, Europe, and Japan was to flood developing nations with cheap credit, upsetting their internal chemistry and drawing them into a snare. What is less understood is just how destructive this has been.

Much of the money was wasted, skewed towards "highly cyclical and rent-based sectors of limited strategic importance for catching up," it said.

...

The extraordinary result is that some countries are slipping backwards, victims of "premature deindustrialisation". Many of them have fallen further behind the rich world than they were in 1980 despite opening up their economies and following the global policy script diligently.

...

We are left with a world in a state of leaderless policy inertia, unable to escape slow suffocation. Trade is stagnant. Deflation is still knocking at the door a full seven-and-a-half years into the economic cycle, even with the monetary pedal pushed to the floor. The next downturn will test this regime to destruction.

...

Its prescription is radical. The world must jettison neo-liberal ideology, and launch a "global new deal" with a blitz of investment on strategic sectors. It wants a return of the "developmental state", commanding a potent industrial policy, and backed by severe controls on capital flows.

Fast forward to today, and the recovery hasn't materialized. And Fed officials, current and former, are singing a different tune about ever restoring the balance sheet to pre-2008 levels.

... even progressive WaPo readers sense that the Fed is clueless, and that there are no brilliant people in Washington working on a "plan" to save us. Extraordinary monetary policy is the new normal, and all those pundits who assumed the Fed knew what it was doing were- and are- wrong.