Barry Ritholtz picks up on a keen insight from Floyd Norris, who points out how last week’s unemployment figures were misleading. The official report said that unemployment had risen to 10.2 percent. Norris reports that due to seasonal adjustment, the figures were skewed and that the actual unemployment rate sits at 9.5 percent. Norris also found that the number of jobs grew by 80,000. And, as Ritholtz says, “The unadjusted numbers are actually constructive: they suggest that some hiring (College grads especially) is starting to improve.”

Felix Salmon gives us his perspective on Bob Pozen’s new book—Too Big to Save? How to Fix the U.S. Financial System. Salmon shows a nifty makeshift chart that illustrates how many good recommendations (read: the ones he agrees with) are in the book. Though Salmon and Pozen are in quite a bit of agreement, for Salmon, there are a few major points of dissent. According to Salmon, Pozen believes that “banks should have small and professional super-boards which, rather than simply rubber-stamping the decisions of the CEO, take a much more active interest in the way the bank is run,” encouraging private equity firms to own and invest in banks. Salmon counters:

My view is that the rates of return targeted and required by private-equity investors are far too high for banking, which should be a boring industry, and that even if safeguards are put in place to stop PE-owned banks from lending to sister companies, management at such institutions will try as hard as they can to bend the rules to maximize leverage and profits. And that they will be positively encouraged to do so by their small super-boards.

But the two agree on one important point: that if swift and ambitious action is not taken (as recommended in the book), “we will have more crises, they will be increasingly severe, and they will be increasingly frequent.”

Paul Krugman examines a recent study put out by Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O’Rourke—among others—that explores policy effects and fiscal multipliers. Looking into our own economic history alone is misleading, as Krugman and his subjects say. Krugman writes, “We didn’t have a really big fiscal expansion until World War II; and WWII isn’t a good experiment because the surge in defense spending was accompanied by government policies that suppressed private demand, such as rationing and restrictions on investment.” To get around this, Eichengreen and O’Rourke use “a broad international cross-section,” which according to Krugman works. And, in the end, Krugman sums up their findings: “Yes, fiscal expansion is expansionary.”

Today, Brad DeLong posts an econ-comic.