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Well, the banks are close to being recapitalized, so that brings us roughly back to where we started (minus 5 million jobs and $11 trillion in wealth). But while that is a necessary condition for recovery, many of the other original problems (excessive household debt, for example) just keep chugging along.

“About 5.4 million of the country’s 45 million home loans were delinquent or in some stage of the foreclosure process in the first three months of the year, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. [.] The figures released Thursday suggested that prime fixed-rate loans were supplanting risky subprime loans and rising adjustable-rate mortgages as the force behind the foreclosure crisis. In the first quarter, a seasonally adjusted 6.06 percent of all prime loans were delinquent.” (WSJ)

I think a lot of us take for granted how good we have it. Here’s a nice look at how “rich” you are, by Catherine Mulbrandon at visualizingeconomics.com. It’s been around for a while (uses 2000 data), but I just found her website this week.

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Want to know what the mainstream media (MSM) will be talking about this week? Take a look at calendars of economic data releases. In addition to showing the schedule of releases, many show predictions, consensus forecasts, past values, and color code the over/unders. They are available at a number of places. here are a few:

FXStreet (my favorite: interactive drill-downs to historical data; nifty filters)

New York Times

Bloomberg

The NYT maintains a tool showing the latest updates for five credit market indicators (3mo Treasuries, Libor, Ted spread, 30-day commercial paper, and high yield bond yields). Sometimes I just want a quick look at the latest numbers.

Note: Similarly, their Markets page and Economy pages provide clean up-to-date presentations on a variety of indicators.

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The NYT has updated one of my favorite interactive presentations of Case-Shiller’s 20 city housing index. It shows how each cities’ performance versus the national index (the light grey bars in the background).

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Buried in a lot of videos and audio analysis on this FT tool are some very interesting charts showing how much damage has been done to pension systems around the world (and not just in the past year).

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Data from Dec 07- Apr 09. There isn’t too much interesting here, unless you want to compare states using the chart on the right.

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The interesting part are the bubble roll-overs: they show who tookover each bank’s assets, and how much each closure cost the FDIC.

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Charts from Ritholtz below. An amusing article on how they’re trying to spin them as not that bad: “Case-Shiller Sucks. But Who Cares, That’s Just Backwards Looking” by Joe Weisenthal.

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From the Center for Global Development, the Commitment to Development Index (CDI) rates 22 rich countries on how much they help poor countries build prosperity, good government, and security. Each rich country gets scores in seven policy areas, which are averaged for an overall score.

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Updated with data from the latest World Economic Outlook report. Allows drill down, country and aggregate comparisons (via the chart at the bottom), and animation of the last 29 years (to watch the world change). You can also view other datasets (BOP, etc).

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The data is a little bit old, but it’s still an interesting look at the country.

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“From the early 1990s through the peak of the last business cycle, relatively low U.S. unemployment rates seemed to make the United States a model for the rest of the world’s economies. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and other international organizations all praised the U.S. unemployment performance and urged the rest of the world’s rich countries to emulate the “flexibility” of the U.S. model.  However, this report shows that in the current economic crisis, the U.S. unemployment rate ranks 4th to last among the major OECD countries.” Source: CEPR

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Foreign Policy has an article on how VesselTracker.com uses Google Earth to literally show the stalled world economy in the form of ships sitting idle off the shore of Singapore.

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