Credit card issuers boost rates ahead of tougher rules (L.A. Times)

Banks "are getting their shots in while they can," says a prominent observer. More: "For the three months that ended June 30, U.S. households on average carried a credit card balance of $7,987, down from a high of $8,529 in the third quarter of last year, according to Moody's Economy.com."

The Coming Recovery Will Most Likely Not Be Robust (Seeking Alpha, Tom Lindmark)

Parsing IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard's prediction that the Great Recession has permanently damaged economic growth.

Time Warner, YouTube Reach Video, Ad Rev Agreement (WSJ)

Small picture: Google on the march to make its YouTube unit show a profit. Big picture: Latest in a series of pacts that will allow advertisers to make big footprints on the Internet. (See also "YouTube Pumps More Ads Into Lineup.") Bad news for network TV; great news for bloggers looking to spice up their sites. Even better news: Adult Swim clips will be available on YouTube.

US Life Expectancy Reaches All Time High (Medical News Today)

Is that good news or bad news? We're up to nearly 78, so we'll be even crankier for even longer and will cause more traffic accidents. We'll also require more health care for longer, and you'll have to pay for it.

Princeton, Harvard Share Top Spot in U.S. News College Rankings (Bloomberg)

Meaningless ratings (except for the huge PR value) by the ailing U.S. News & World Report yield the usual suspects. This account by Oliver Staley is an unusually thorough look at a highly (and humorously) flawed process during which schools are increasingly accused of "manipulating" their admission policies to impress an increasing irrelevant news magazine. More scary is that colleges are now judging prospective students by their "personalities," as the WSJ reports. (Mark me down for a trade school.)

MORE HEADLINES FOLLOW

Madoff Investor's Art Dealer Got $26.5 Million in Rothko Sale (Bloomberg)

Madoff pal Ezra Merkin sells off art for $310 million to unknown buyer. Fee to mysterious agent (believed to be Kyra Sedgwick's stepfather) dwarfs mysterious buyer's agent fee. Cuomo skims off $191 million, puts it in escrow for Madoff's/Merkin's victims.

Two years of pain and mega bonuses are back (Times U.K.)

Investment-banking is back in a big way, and investment bankers are popular once again. "Guaranteed multi-year bonuses, which have been attacked as the worst kind of banking excess, are back. ... It wasn't meant to be like this. Regulators were meant to change the rules to make sure that such bonuses would never be paid again. We had the Walker report on executive pay, and Barack Obama's strictures on remuneration in America. Funnily enough, they do not seem to have curbed banks' behaviour one bit."

US food groups warn of sugar shortage (Telegraph U.K.)

If you consider Hershey, Mars, and Krispy Kreme "food groups."

MADOFF'S MAN DODGES GUN, DRUG CHARGES (NY Post)

Frank DiPascali's deal "shut the door on other skeletons in his closet, including guns and drugs."

MORE HEADLINES NEXT PAGE

Your state is in deep financial trouble, and now that it has managed to patch together a fiscal 2010 budget, the real trouble begins. Service cuts, federal stimulus money, reserve funds — those are history. Where are the new solutions for next year's budgets — and the next year's? Bailouts? Yeah, right.

A new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities paints a bleak picture that won't have the impact on the stock market that the Fed's lukewarmly optimistic statement today ("Fed Says Economy Appears More Stable," as the WSJ puts it) had. The Dow industrials rose 120 points after the Fed's announcement, because the state budget woes play no part in market psychology.

While Wall Street is digging out from last year's disaster, amid the Fed's pronouncement that we may very well have reached bottom, the states are still sliding down rapidly. See the chart above, which compares the current recession with a recent one.

Hardly surprising, but see Paul Learton's "This Chart Can Kill Any Bull," which contends that "this bear market is nowhere near over," even though the S&P 500 has rallied more than 20 percent since that magic number of 666 on March 10. Learton writes:

Well, who says he knows? Learton's not claiming to know, but he merely points out:

So why not follow the advice of the blogger known as Everyday Finance? He basically advises that you take no one's advice:

Many of you twenty-somethings — including those who have gravitated to "youth-magnet" cities — have few job prospects, of course, and thus have no money to invest, so you didn't miss anything, and you can just ignore all of the above.

Looking for ways to weather the recession — just in case Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is wrong — you might want to heed the two suggestions dispensed by the New York Times in separate stories on Friday the 13th to just throw in the towel.

In "Thoughts on Walking Away from Your Home Loan," Ron Lieber makes a doomsday scenario sound almost, well, painless. Don't qualify for the Obama plan? Not enough income to pay your loans? Can't refinance?

So just stop paying. As Lieber says:

And don't fret too much about it. Though he's writing for the "Your Money" column, Lieber exhibits about as little faith in financial planners as one could possibly have:

Meanwhile, don't worry about setting a bad example for your kids, because here's another workaround for their future: Tell them to forget about college for at least a year. In another Friday the 13th piece, Jonathan D. Glater wrote, in "Delaying College for a Year Could Have Benefits," that even if Congress okays Obama's expanded college-aid plans, they won't take effect until a year from this July. So he says:

Actually, the latter idea (delaying college) makes sense — even in good times, many Europeans and Aussies take a year to travel after they graduate from high school instead of rushing off to college to become investment bankers. Many U.S. baby boomers would have done the same thing (the year-off thing) if they hadn't been threatened with the draft during the Vietnam War.

Now, with no draft, no jobs, no home, no prospects, why not take a year off? Maybe Bernanke will be right and you can resume your dreams next year.