Brad DeLong posted a fairly ambivalent soliloquy on the state of, well, states. In good news, the "economy appears to be nearing the end of contraction," even as only 10 percent of stimulus funds have been sent out to state and local governments, DeLong said. That being said, it's pretty easy to see that state fiscal budgets are suffering in a bad way, Brad added, and it's difficult to see how the stimulus is helping the situation, particularly in the realm of public works and infrastructure. We couldn't agree with you more, Brad.

Paul Krugman started his holiday weekend early.

Barry Ritholtz, meanwhile, posted this chart that maps job-loss percentages in each post-WW II recession and how quickly those figures rebounded. It's both fascinating and somewhat terrifying in what it suggests: While in most of these recessions, job losses rebounded between month eight and month 16, our job-loss rates have continued downward. This, naturally, begs the question of whether you can really call it a "recession" if unemployment rates improve within a year. Damn subjective terms; they get us every time.

Felix Salmon calls bank overdraft fees a "tax on poverty," lambasting large firms for bolstering their balance sheets by upping the cost and frequency of the penalty assessments on accounts that fall below $0. He highlights the data points that fuel his populist outrage, including an estimate that $20.2 million households each pay $1,374 in overdraft charges per year. Bank of America (BAC), for example, has now doubled the maximum number of overdraft fees it will post per account per day to 10, says Salmon.