Fertility is falling and families are shrinking in places— such as Brazil, Indonesia, and even parts of India—that people think of as teeming with children. As our briefing shows, the fertility rate of half the world is now 2.1 or less—the magic number that is consistent with a stable population and is usually called “the replacement rate of fertility”. Sometime between 2020 and 2050 the world’s fertility rate will fall below the global replacement rate.

At a time when Malthusian worries are resurgent and people fear the consequences for an overcrowded planet, the decline in fertility is surprising and somewhat reassuring. It means that worries about a population explosion are themselves being exploded—and it carries a lesson about how to solve the problems of climate change.

Today’s fall in fertility is both very large and very fast. Poor countries are racing through the same demographic transition as rich ones, starting at an earlier stage of development and moving more quickly. The transition from a rate of five to that of two, which took 130 years to happen in Britain—from 1800 to 1930—took just 20 years—from 1965 to 1985—in South Korea. Mothers in developing countries today can expect to have three children. Their mothers had six. In some countries the speed of decline in the fertility rate has been astonishing. In Iran, it dropped from seven in 1984 to 1.9 in 2006—and to just 1.5 in Tehran. That is about as fast as social change can happen.

On the other hand:

The Malthusians are right that the world’s population is still increasing and can do a lot more environmental damage before it peaks at just over 9 billion in 2050.

On a vaguely related topic, many Chinese never learned how not to get pregnant.

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It says something about the powers that be at the time that no one was watching for this crap, Madoff, etc.

In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

Goldman’s sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation’s premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.

Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk.

Now, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses, and a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman’s failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws.

The leadership of Al Qaeda is in Pakistan, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Thursday. “I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to,” she added.

“Maybe that’s the case; maybe they’re not gettable. I don’t know… As far as we know, they are in Pakistan,” Clinton told senior Pakistani newspaper editors in Lahore, AFP reported. “The percentage of taxes on GDP (in Pakistan) is among the lowest in the world… We (the United States) tax everything that moves and doesn’t move, and that’s not what we see in Pakistan,” she said.

That’s great, Hillary!

Not only does this show that government numbers like unemployment and GDP are too broad to be really useful, but that the details within them are more troubling for the future than the public realizes.

The third-quarter GDP figures, released on Oct. 29, showed the economy growing at a 3.5% annual pace, breaking a string of four consecutive negative quarters. The growth was driven mostly by a surge in the production of motor vehicles and other manufactured goods.

This number was greeted by many economists and journalists as confirmations that the recession is over. What’s more, the rise in real GDP, combined with a sharp fall in employment in the third quarter, implies that productivity also soared during the period. Good news, right?

The trouble is that those GDP and productivity growth figures could be significantly overestimated—perhaps by one percentage point or even more.

That’s because the official statistics are not designed to pick up cutbacks in “intangible investments” such as business spending on research and development, product design, and worker training. There’s ample evidence to suggest that companies, to reduce costs and boost short-term profits, are slashing this kind of spending, which is essential for innovation.
[...]
Here’s a sobering sign that companies are robbing the future to pay for short-term profits: Over the past year, U.S. employment of scientists and engineers—the people who create the next generation of products and make the U.S. more competitive over the long term—has fallen by 6.3%, according to a BusinessWeek tabulation of unpublished data. Yet overall employment has fallen only 4.1%.

“We’re having a swell un-foreclosure party tonight. We’ll start stacking the loan papers for his bonfire about 8. Can you come? Bring smores!”

Five people are charged with torturing and robbing two loan modification agents they thought falsely promised to save their home from foreclosure.

Two men were charged Monday with torture, robbery and false imprisonment.

Another man and two women pleaded not guilty to the same charges Friday.

Prosecutors say Daniel Weston and Mary Ann Parmelee hired two loan modification agents in hopes of keeping their home but believed the men took their money and did nothing.

Prosecutors claim the victims were lured to Glendale on Oct. 20, held for hours, beaten and robbed before one escaped.

What about those of us with our own domains?

According to the Insurance Information Institute, drivers with lower credit scores file 40% more claims than drivers at the higher end of the credit scale.

Forget “red” state, “blue” state… certain states also have higher credit scores than others. The Dakotas and Wisconsin lead the country while Texas and Nevada have the lowest average credit scores.

We found another intriguing credit score correlation, email address domains. Based on a sample of 20,000 credit scores, our data shows that there is a difference of average scores based on what email service users prefer. Interestingly, Gmail and Comcast users came out the top with a higher average, while AOL and Yahoo users had the lowest average credit scores.

What does it all mean?

RTFA to find out.

Growing numbers of Americans who have lost houses to foreclosure are landing in homeless shelters, according to social service groups and a recent report by a coalition of housing advocates.

Only three years ago, foreclosure was rarely a factor in how people became homeless. But among the homeless people that social service agencies have helped over the last year, an average of 10 percent lost homes to foreclosure, according to “Foreclosure to Homelessness 2009,” a survey produced by the National Coalition for the Homeless and six other advocacy groups.
[...]
Most people who become homeless because of foreclosure had been low-income renters whose landlords stopped making their mortgage payments, leaving them scrambling for new housing with little notice and scant savings, according to the survey and interviews with shelters.

But in recent months, there has been a visible increase in the number of former homeowners showing up in shelters.
[...]
“These families never needed help before,” said Larry Haynes, executive director of Mercy House in Santa Ana, Calif. “They haven’t a clue about where to go, and they have all sorts of humiliation issues. They don’t even know what to say, what to ask for.”

Obama team makes it official: Budget deficit hits record. By a lot. – The Oval: Tracking the Obama presidency — At some point they will stop blaming Bush for everything.

The Obama administration has released new deficit numbers, and they are not pretty.

The deficit for Fiscal Year 2009, which ended Sept. 30, came in at a record $1.42 trillion, more than triple the record set just last year. A year ago, as the financial crisis hit and the Bush administration prepared massive bailout plans, the deficit was $455 billion.

Here’s a question. If you hand cash to a bank teller to deposit into your account, then go to an ATM and withdraw that money, wouldn’t you think that money is there for you to withdraw? Ha! Deposits often post after withdrawals to ensure a fee on the unsuspecting. And then there was the ATM that allowed you to withdraw more than you had in the account (guess calculating balance minus withdrawal is too complicated to program) thus incurring a fee.

You’ve got to hand it to the bankers. (Actually, we pretty much already have.) They blow themselves and the economy up while paying themselves grotesquely large salaries. Then, working with government officials, they figure out multiple ways to get taxpayers and customers to fund their recapitalization. [...] And how does the industry that has received so much largesse from taxpayers repay the public? By jacking up fees for basic services. According to Bankrate.com, the average surcharge for using a money machine rose from $1.78 in 2007 to $1.98 in 2008. It’s probably higher now. Last week, when I stopped payment on a check, I was astonished to find the charge was $32—about what it costs to sponsor a child for a month through Save the Children. Meanwhile, consumer complaints about being hit with massive and repeated overdraft fees have led to threats of congressional action.

The reality is that banks feel they have no other choice. Newsweek’s Steve Tuttle recently argued that the outrage over overdraft fees is overdone because people incur them only when they spend money they don’t have. Of course, banks are in the business of enabling just that sort of activity. They lend money to businesses and consumers to spend on stuff—cars, factories, houses—for which they can’t pay cash. The problem for the banks is that the demand for that core business of spending money you don’t have is way down.

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A fixed-price special often sounds like a sweet deal. But while more eateries are offering such bundled deals these days, they typically provide smaller portions—which may leave you feeling a little hungry.

These days, the average markup for an iced tea runs a whopping 4,400 percent. Just don’t expect you’ll always get a lemon wedge with it. At about 10 cents a slice, the lemon costs about twice what the drink itself does.

Read the article for six more examples of the restaurant side of the shrink ray phenomenon that’s been going on in grocery stores for some time.

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