The moment everyone expected but no one was waiting for has arrived: Unemployment is in the double-digits. The New York Times says that 10.2 percent is a 26-year high in the 60-year history of government record-keeping. Only 1982, when 10.8 percent of workers were sidelined, was worse. Dampening the bad news, President Obama signed an extension of unemployment benefits for the jobless, allowing them to spend nearly two full years on the dole. The article dives into the metrics but also the psychology of long-term unemployment. It cites one worker who, after a year and a half, continues to drive to his unemployment office, send out job applications, and return home to “his sagging couch and his television, where cheerful news anchors tell him that the economy is looking up.”

But, is unemployment 10.2 percent or 17.5 percent? The latter figure includes underemployment, and that actually beats the high of 17.1 percent set in December of 1982. The discouraged and the part-timers who want to be full-timers are counted in this figure, notes the Times. “Ten percent is a terribly important number,” a democratic pollster noted in the Wall Street Journal’s take on the figures. No word on his thoughts regarding 17.5 percent.

Citigroup (C) is granting its employees options to convince them to stay, the Times writes. Options grants, which the article says have long been criticized as creating perverse incentives, are being presented by the bank as a way for employees to rebuild their nest eggs while remaining with the company. Employee savings were nearly wiped out when Citigroup stock plunged in value during the height of the financial crisis. Despite the long-standing criticisms of options programs, the construction of this one may make sense: It requires three years of vesting, has a strike price slightly above current share pricing, and preserves capital for the bank. As such, one critic of options grants told the paper, “They are trying to reward staff that had the guts to hold onto their stock during this turbulent period for the company.”

Hedge funds are on edge after several high-profile arrests on insider trading charges were made in recent weeks. The Times reports that executives are dropping a dime—to their lawyers—to re-examine their compliance with insider information laws. “Defcon 2” is how one executive described the effort not to run afoul of the rules. Because the executives fear wiretaps, they’re telling staffers to think of phone conversations the way they think of e-mail: as if it could end up on the “front page of The New York Times.” Meanwhile, the Journal says SAC Capital may soon be part of the broader and ongoing insider trading investigations.

AIG (AIG) is profitable again, but executives say the road the company is on won’t necessarily remain smooth. Regulatory filings indicate that its investments are performing well, even as insurance sales are faltering. Looming over future balance sheets is the massive debt the firm must repay to the U.S. government and a $5 billion charge related to its restructuring. A topic AIG didn’t discuss in its filing was employee retention, but the Times notes several executives have jumped ship to work on a competing venture with Hank Greenberg, who was AIG’s CEO for nearly 40 years.

Goldman Sachs (GS) wanted to buy tax credits from Fannie Mae (FNM), which has lost so much money that the credits are useless. The government said no, reports the Journal, because the deal would be a net loss for taxpayers and because it didn’t want to appear to be favoring the pre-eminent investment bank in such savvy deals. Meanwhile the Times says Fannie will soon ask for another $15 billion in bailout funds, on top of the $50 billion it’s already received.

The Obama administration wanted the Federal Reserve to be Wall Street’s primary regulator, but Congress didn’t get a copy of that memo. In fact, the Washington Post explains that Congress basically doesn’t like the Fed and thinks it has failed one too many times. So legislators are proposing their own regulatory reform proposals, further dragging out the fight over reform.

The Times catches up to the story of the virtual goods economy, which generated $5 billion in real cash. Skype’s founders reached a settlement with eBay (EBAY) over the auction house’s sale of the online call service. The founders had long railed against the sale, wanting to remove the pressures of short-term profitability from their grander plans for reacquiring the calling firm. Finally Barclays’ (BCS) CEO, in defense of his industry, recently said, “profit is not satanic.” A Goldman Sachs International adviser seconded the thought, adding, “We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all.”

Over at the New York Times Magazine, “Consumed” columnist Rob Walker has seen a Hummer— the large and often derided, military-derived General Motors SUV that will soon be sold as a brand to the Chinese—in the parking lot of a Goodwill and “smirked.” The implication is that the Hummer owner painted himself (and it’s probably a him) into a financial corner through his purchase of a pricey, gas-chuggin’ monstrosity and must now wear clothes and shoes that other people have worn before him. Or maybe he was just looking for a set of old golf clubs or hoping to pick up a dozen wine glasses for $6. Point is: You own a Hummer now, you’re on the road to ruin.

Of, if you consider some research that Walker cites, you find yourself in a “brand-mediated moral conflict.” Basically, people who own Hummers have a vastly different view of themselves than people who don’t like people who own Hummers.

It’s always tempting to view Hummer, now headed for the Middle Kingdom and new life as an emblem of hulking aspiration for a whole new population, as a symbol of something arrogant and fallen in Americans. Not long after the Hummer arrived, we rushed at breakneck speed toward an inconvenient truth, peak oil, the 2008 gas crisis, the Great Recession, and the Detroit meltdown.

But the truth is that Hummer is just a brand, and GM wanted to develop it because it needed vehicles with an aggressive image to suggest bold, aggressive things about itself as a car company. GM does the same thing with Corvette, but there’s not very much Corvette hatred in the land, mainly because people who drive Corvettes are viewed as pathetic midlife gearhead hillbillies; if they had any class, they’d drive Porsches. The Hummer owner is reviled. The Corvette owner is pitied. Also, Corvettes have been around for so long that no one gives them much thought, whereas Hummer is seen as the Darth Vader of automotive galaxy.

But it was just a vehicle, it never sold in massive numbers, it didn’t really mean anything, except as a focal point for fringe debates about personal style and the environment. It garnered GM the brand attention it sought. It’s now too charged and difficult to manufacture and market effectively, so GM is selling it. As purchases go, it was a pretty good one. Some have argued that it’s more sustainable than a Prius, because it’s built to last.

What Hummer-hatred really points to is a misunderstanding about environmental damage. There are many reasons why the globe is warmer, ranging from continued burning of coal to deforestation to transportation emissions. On this last, it isn’t Hummer that’s the real problem—it’s the widespread availability of personal mobility. The Volkswagen Beetle did far more damage to the environment than the Hummer ever did, or will (more than 21 million Beetles were built). But such is the trade-off. We’re not a society that’s going to give up personal mobility so we can have cleaner air and a cooler atmosphere. So in that sense, there’s a little Hummer in all of us.

Felix Salmon came back earlier this week and has dived right back into parsing the turmoil. Today he addressed the rising unemployment rate—which, as we've learned, is at 10.2 percent, its peak since 1983. Salmon takes the time to draw out the implications of such high unemployment and comes to a rather depressing conclusion. At the first level, he points out that consumer spending will continue to decrease as unemployment increases. Makes sense. And it also makes sense, he says, for the Fed to keep interest rates at or near zero while so many Americans are out of work. And this is where it gets complicated, according to Salmon and Mohamed El-Erian, whom he quotes throughout his post. El-Erian—the CEO of Pimco—writes in the Financial Times, "There is one public good that needs to be replaced: the key role that the US has played as the engine of global growth. This role is now constrained by the debt of US households." And Salmon believes that this shift calls for a structural change to U.S. global and economic policy and, more importantly, swift and coordinated action. But Salmon is skeptical. He says, "So far I’ve heard nothing out of Washington which says to me that the White House has a plan for addressing long-term structural problems in terms of unemployment, capital flows, and interest rates." And the depressing conclusion: "Maybe, then, there simply isn’t a solution: the problem is just too big, too complex, and too intractable."

Paul Krugman, though, discusses one possible solution: a New-Deal-era Work Projects Administration. He says, "You can make a pretty good case that just employing a lot of people directly would be a lot more cost-effective; the WPA and CCC cost surprisingly little given the number of people put to work." Although Krugman considers a Work Projects Administration to be a viable solution, he, too, is skeptical saying that government and politics often move too slowly to stop the bleeding. "So why aren’t we doing this? Politics, of course: government is the problem, not the solution, even when it is, you know, the solution, and cheaper than running things through the private sector."

Brad DeLong also takes a look at the unemployment rate and looks back into his own blog history for a cause. In July 2008, DeLong wrote, "If we find ourselves in a financial-meltdown world where unemployment or inflation kisses 10%—then I will unhappily concede, and say that Greenspanism was a mistake." To make good on his promise, today he writes, "Yes, it was a mistake. I hereby deny, abjure, and repent my previous allegiance to the gospel of 'Greenspanism.' I reject Greenspan, and all his works, and all his empty promises ... I will strive now to walk in the light."

On another note, Barry Ritholtz also scowls at our government for considering measures to scale back the regulations in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, passed in 2002. "So long economic collapse," he says,"hello accounting fraud." The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was passed in response to Enron and the like in order to ramp-up regulation. Ritholtz quotes Floyd Norris, who writes, "The House Financial Services Committee this week approved an amendment to the Investor Protection Act of 2009—a name George Orwell would appreciate—to allow most companies to never comply with the law, and mandating a study to see whether it would be a good idea to exempt additional ones as well." Then Ritholtz points out that the recent "near systemic collapse" was caused by banks given special exemptions. The main culprits, according to Ritholtz, are aggressive lobbyists who continue to push for less transparency and less oversight. He says, "This is a shameless attempt for a freer hand to avoid responsibility and correct marking of assets."

The Securities and Exchange Commission has been busy recently looking into all sorts of sneaky-sounding market practices that may be giving some traders unfair advantages over others. This week, SEC Commissioner Elisse Walter told Reuters that she’s increasingly concerned about "sponsored naked access."

What’s that? It’s a practice in which brokerages that are certified to trade on an exchange, such as the Nasdaq, rent their access to that exchange to high-speed traders. While trading directly on the exchange is desirable because it’s faster and more competitive, the SEC is concerned that the practice introduces too much risk. According to the Wall Street Journal, one worry is “that a trading outfit could suffer a massive loss through a computer glitch that threatens the financial stability of the sponsoring broker, or triggers a sudden and unexplained decline in the broader market.” Recently, SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro offered a helpful analogy to describe the situation. She said, "I liken it to giving your car keys to a friend who doesn't have a license and letting him drive unaccompanied."

More goodies from Ken Auletta's new book Googled. When Eric Schmidt applied for the CEO gig, Larry Page and Sergey Brin weren't exactly thrilled to see him. In fact, they didn't really want a CEO at all, but the VCs who were funding them insisted on hiring "adult supervision." So they subjected Schmidt to a battery of rigorous tests, including something called the "airplane test." It's fairly simple: If you had to sit next to this guy on an airplane, they asked themselves, would he be interesting enough to talk to for the next five hours?

Fortunately, Schmidt wowed them with one ace up his sleeve: He was a Burner. "He passed the airplane test when he revealed that he, too, was a regular attendee at Burning Man," Auletta wrote. "How much of a suit could he be?"

Even so, settling in at Google (GOOG) could be tricky. How would Schmidt handle the unique, let-the-engineers-play-in-the-sandbox culture at the GooglePlex? Here's how. "Schmidt was assigned a small office containing two desks, but before he arrived an engineer looking for a place to park spotted the empty office and moved in," Auletta writes. "According to Rajeev Motwani, who continued to advise his Stanford proteges, when Schmidt arrived he assessed the situation and quietly took the second desk. 'They became office mates. Can you imagine a company where an engineer can move into the CEO's office? That tells you a lot about Eric, and about the company. He understood the company's DNA, which is that what you do defines your importance.' "

For several years now, two very smart people—Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker and polymath jurist Richard Posner—have written a blog together in which they debate the economic and legal issues of the day. Now their essays from that blog have been collected into a book, Uncommon Sense, which includes insights on everything from polygamy to organ sales to taxes on fattening foods. But there's one idea that the book pushes that's worth focusing on, because it's one of the worst in the history of thinking about business or morality, and a truly striking example of how smart people can come up with dumb ideas: the “shareholder value” theory of corporate ethics.

You can read Becker's take on corporate social responsibility here if you want to get his side of this in his own words. But in summary, Becker's view of corporate morality is that the only ethical responsibilities of business executives are to obey the law, adhere to contracts (really just a subset of the first rule), and, most critically, to maximize the price of their companies' shares. The first coherent statement of this moral view came from the economist Milton Friedman in a full-throated defense of capitalism with the brilliantly blunt title, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is To Increase Its Profits.” Now the bogeyman of creeping socialism that Milton worried about 40 years ago is long gone, as is Friedman himself, who died in 2006, but his contentious and now ossified principles live on in the writings of Becker, his most faithful student.

The Friedman-Becker moral theory has three virtues. The first is its simplicity; it reduces the whole tangle of moral issues to a simple bright-line test. The second is that it is able to justify most miserable behavior and even turn the tables on anyone who suggests, for instance, that companies should worry about the treatment of workers in Chinese factories or the fairness of offering subprime mortgages with usurious terms. To care about things like this is not only unnecessary, the theory suggests, but actually wrong because it betrays the interests of the shareholders who are the executive's ultimate employers.

The third virtue is that it combines supremely well with the idea that senior executives should have pay packages that rely mainly on stock options and reward them for a single-minded devotion to the share price. The combination of the “shareholder value” theory and stock- and options-based compensation creates a beautifully virtuous circle. The profits of the shareholders are the CEO’s own interests, too, so if acting in the best interests of the shareholders (that is, raising the share price) is the CEOs main moral responsibility ... well, gee, acting ethically means acting in his own best interest is always the right thing to do.

The shareholder value theory demands almost nothing of contemporary executives that they don't already want to do. And on top of this, it defangs the one meaningful charge—following the law—because, in general, proponents of the theory have absolutely nothing to say about corporate efforts to affect the law (think of the Chamber of Commerce campaign against environmental legislation). So the shareholder value theory winds up telling executives that their only responsibility is to maximize their own profits, except insofar as they are guided by regulations that they actively try to minimize by lobbying. And, by the way, defeating or creating loopholes in laws is not only OK, but the only right thing to do because it, too, is—you know where this sentence will end—in the best interests of the shareholders.

For most ordinary people, the Alice-in-Wonderland absurdity of this is ragingly obvious. But not to Becker, who is a shareholder-value-theory absolutist. This is not because he is an evil man. It's simply that he is convinced that having corporations follow their economic bliss will create the biggest economy, and the details of what happens along the way don't really concern him. He is like the drawing room social Darwinists of the turn of the last century, looking so far ahead toward the mountain peak of “progress” that the treacherous crevasse directly in front seems like a miniscule concern. The immediate objections that even the most ordinary reader will come up with—what happens if a company discovers that, say, using radioactive materials to make day-glo gadgets is dangerous, before the government has made them illegal?—elude his Nobel-prize winning gaze.

In this moment of public anger over corporate malfeasance, plenty of people are ready to blame the economic crisis on the moral downfall of business, and ideas such as Becker's will make it easier for them to do so. But a more subtle reading of the effect of the shareholder value of business morality is not that it made business executives markedly less ethical, but that it insulated them in a comfortable cocoon of ignorance, encouraging them to think about what they were doing in the narrowest possible terms, telling them that if they took care of the stock price (and themselves), there was nothing to worry about. It is a formula for avoidance, for never thinking about what can go wrong.

At some point in the future, folks will read Becker's ideas about corporate social responsibility and wonder how anyone could really believe them. They will seem as dated as the 19th century musings of writers like Herbert Spencer do now. But one of the most perplexing things about reading Uncommon Sense is that it ultimately leaves you wondering just how much Becker believes his own rhetoric.

Toward the end of the book there is a chapter that takes on Yahoo’s and Google’s (GOOG) dealings with the government of China, which has tried to use the records of Internet companies to identify dissidents. For Yahoo (YHOO) to turn over the names of its users to an authoritarian state, however, is clearly going too far. Says Becker: "I do believe that it is reprehensible for Yahoo to disclose the names of Chinese citizens using its services, particularly when the information Yahoo has about one of them led to his arrest and imprisonment. Whatever one's beliefs about other rules of corporate behavior in China, disclosure of names of 'dissidents' who face arrest and punishment is unacceptable."

It's hard to see what the bright-line difference is here between this and "other rules of corporate behavior." Yahoo's justification for doing that was that it was merely following the local laws. And why shouldn't it? Surely getting an edge in China is in the shareholders' interest. The most plausible explanation here is pretty simple. It's that Becker doesn't really think much of corporate efforts to raise foreign living standards or avoid bribery (possibly he doesn't care much, but, more charitably, it's clear that he doesn't think they do anyone any good) but does care about the speech rights of dissidents in a dictatorship. I think this last part is to his credit, but it is also devastating to his thesis, which just shows how quickly an absolute rule on the preeminence of shareholder rights, like many similar uniform principles, falls apart when it collides with an issue you really care about.

There's the rub of the minimalist view of business morality: When it's pushed far enough, nobody really believes it, and corporate chieftains who operate on its precepts climb its steps to find not a lectern but a hidden noose. The more assertively that industries—from health insurers who sell plans whose fine print makes them worthless to power generators hooked on coal—have embraced the “whatever serves the shareholders” mode of operating, the more they have found themselves on the defensive. Forty years ago, maybe capitalism really did require a contentious defense, but now the moral minimalism looks like a very tattered seam in the social fabric, and even Becker can't fully rouse himself to stitch it back together in the same old way. The shareholder value theory is ethics on the cheap, a low cost way of justifying anything you want, but like the cheap straw house in the fable, it tends to fall over at the first wind—and right now, the winds of outrage are blowing really hard.

It's a bad sign when the product you're selling is so awful that you can't bring yourself to name it.

Chicago Tribune reporter Monica Eng asked Kimberly Schwabenbauer, dietitian and marketing manager of Super Bakery, about the doughnuts her company sells to the Chicago Public Schools for its breakfast program. Schwabenbauer "made it clear that she doesn't like to use the d-word when referring to her company's product: a round, sweet, cakey pastry with a hole in the middle."

When she absolutely had to say 'doughnut,'" Eng wrote, "she prefaced it with 'quote unquote.' "

Now, quote-unquote doughnuts are not in themselves awful. In fact, at their best, they are wonderful things, though they should be consumed with extreme discretion. These particular quote-unquote doughnuts, though, are being sold as a breakfast staple to public-school students in Chicago. Parents, however, might not know about the centrality of doughnuts to their kids' most important meal of the day. School menus identify them by their brand name, MVP Breakfast.

"City school officials did not respond to questions about why they use such an unrecognizable term on the menu," Eng wrote in her examination of the sugary meals served in the CPS's meal program, which by her account seems to be woefully mismanaged, and not only because of the "nutritionally fortified" doughnuts. Also on the menu (and always available): Pop-Tarts, syrup-drenched waffles, and sugary cereals like Froot Loops.

Until this year, Super Bakery wasn't so frightened of calling a doughnut a doughnut. Before it became MVP Breakfast, the product was called Super Donut.

A number of commentators have wondered why Tadashi Yamashina, who runs the Formula One racing effort for Toyota, became so emotional a few days ago when he announced that Toyota would be pulling out of the world’s premier racing organization. Obviously, this was a blow to Toyota’s high-performance pretenses, coming awkwardly on the heels of its debut of a $400,000 Lexus supercar at the Tokyo Motor Show. But it could also be more signs of cracks in Toyota’s legendary management culture. Could it be that the gray-suited men of Toyota City have grown weary of producing ultra-reliable car after ultra-reliable car, but having mastered the mid-market sedan, gnash internally at the prospect of never achieving the mythical heights of Ferrari or Porsche?

Unfortunately, F1 has been something of an expensive debacle for Toyota, which followed Honda in exiting the sport. (Honda’s team was revived as Brawn, and its lead driver, Jenson Button, won this year’s world championship, and Brawn won the manufacturer’s title—so the Toyota team could come back to life under a new name and management scheme). It’s the perception that Toyota threw away money on F1—money that could have been better spent on, oh, I don’t know, designing better floor mats—that may have led to Yamashina’s tears.

A once-endangered species is staging a robust comeback: the deficit hawk. Hunted nearly to death during the Bush years, many varieties not seen in Washington in a decade are now perching on branches and dropping their wisdom. Look, there's the puff-chested congressional peacock hawk, frequently seen strutting about Sunday-morning-TV-show sets complaining about pork while emitting loud honks on the receipt of stimulus funds. The furrowed-brow warbler hawk (natural habitat: the op-ed pages) loathes deficit spending for the purpose of eliminating social injustice but loves it when the spending is used to finance military actions abroad. The blue-bellied partisan hawk nests in think tanks; it goes mute when members of its own party run the show but squawks loudly when opponents run up debt. On Nov. 3, birders sighted the rare skinny parrot hawk, which repeats back calls about fiscal probity. Said President Barack Obama on that date: "The government is going to have to get serious about reducing our debt levels."

Yes, deficits are large. But a lot of this debate is for the birds. It's not uncommon for senators of both parties who oppose health care reform on the grounds that it is fiscally irresponsible to call for the elimination of taxes on the estates of the ultrawealthy. Too often, "deficit reduction is a form of defense—as a shield for policies they don't like," says Maya MacGuineas, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a bipartisan group of deficit hawks that was worried about deficits back when we ran a surplus. Of course, if hypocrisy were a disqualification from public debate, MSNBC would be running the test pattern all day. But there's a larger reason we shouldn't let the deficit hawks ruffle our feathers: As the volume of squawking has risen, the situation has actually become less dire. And even without drastic action, the situation will improve materially in the coming year.

Much of the horrific explosion in the national debt—the deficit soared from $248 billion in 2006 to $1.4 trillion in the recently concluded Fiscal Year 2009—can be pinned on cyclical factors. When the economy goes in the tank, it creates a fiscal double whammy, gutting tax receipts and boosting demand for government spending programs that are both ordinary (increasing unemployment benefits) and extraordinary (bailouts, stimulus). Spending rose 18 percent and revenues fell 16.6 percent in fiscal 2009—the worst decline seen since the 1930s, with corporate income taxes plummeting 55 percent. Had revenues been steady, the deficit would have been only (only, he said) $1 trillion.

But signs of recovery returned with the spring. As the financial system came back from the brink, banks paid back billions in TARP funds. In its mid-session review, issued in late July, the Office of Management and Budget dialed back its estimate for the fiscal 2009 deficit from $1.84 trillion in May to $1.58 trillion, due in large part to the trimming of cash piles set aside to help Wall Street. The stock market rally, recovering corporate profits, and an economy that began to expand at a 3.5 percent rate in the summer have translated into higher-than-expected tax receipts. And so, as the treasury department's Financial Management Service reported, the final numbers came out better both on spending and receipts—with a $1.42 trillion deficit, $138 billion smaller than was forecast in July.

The consensus of economists and politicians has continually underestimated the strength and timing of the recovery. So as the recovery rolls on, we'll continue to see more upside surprises. On Nov. 2, the Treasury Department announced it would need to borrow $276 billion in the fourth quarter, 42 percent less than it thought it needed in July. All those Goldman Sachs (GS) bonuses will be taxed at the highest marginal rate. Add in the prospect of more TARP repayments and job growth, and the United States is likely to experience a sharp cyclical upturn in tax receipts. The Obama administration forecasts that the economy will grow next year at a 2 percent rate and produce a $1.5 trillion deficit. But if the economy grows more rapidly, at 3 percent or 3.5 percent, it's plausible that the deficit will shrink by 10 percent to 20 percent on its own.

Of course, we'll still be left with significant fiscal challenges. "The economy recovering faster than expected is not enough to reassure me about the fiscal picture," said Maya MacGuineas of CRFB. "And while President Obama was right to focus on the economic recovery before reducing the deficit, he has yet to make any of the hard choices necessary to deal with the budget deficit." That's a fair point, made by a consistent voice.

But most of today's situational deficit hawks aren't eager to engage in a serious conversation about the costs of health care—or about the wisdom of extending the Bush tax cuts or the future of entitlements. And the occasional calls to scale back the not-yet-spent stimulus funds for the sake of fiscal probity still ring hollow. Being obsessed with deficit reduction when the economy has suffered its largest setback since the Depression is like being obsessed with water conservation when your house is on fire—an admirable impulse, poorly timed.

State laws boosting the maximum allowance of alcohol in beer are becoming a trend. Alabama and West Virginia have raised the cap to 13.9 percent from 6 percent, according to USA Today. Mississippi and Iowa are considering similar measures.

It's not totally clear what's behind the trend, but it seems to have particular momentum in the Southern states.

The average alcohol content of beer is 4.65 percent. A 14 percent level is nowhere near the 40 percent that is typical of many types of hard liquor. On the other hand, imagine filling up a pint glass with Jack Daniels and chugging it down. (OK, some of us don't have to imagine it.) Wine contains an average 11.45 percent alcohol.

There are plenty of critics of the trend, of course. David Rosenbloom, president of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse told USA Today that the higher the alcohol volume, "the faster you get drunk and the longer you stay drunk."

Which is true, all other things being equal. But are all other things equal? The big brewers probably won't boost the alcohol content of their major brands (since it would alter the taste, and also possibly draw loud criticism). Such laws mostly affect craft brewers, by allowing them much more freedom on the kinds of beers they can produce. For instance, they can add more malt, which generally yields more alcohol.

Drinkers of craft brews, in very general terms, aren't out to get as wasted as they can, as drinkers of Bud or Miller High Life often are. And anyway, given all the high-alcohol hooch out there, if somebody wants to get drunk fast, they have many better options than relatively expensive craft brews.

Chuck Hurley, CEO of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, said that the group's top concern is that the brews are "properly labeled so people understand it takes fewer beers to become intoxicated." Can't argue with that. I'd sure like to know if a beer I ordered contained 16 percent alcohol, the level allowed in Vermont.

As Americans come to terms with yesterday's massacre at Fort Hood, they aren't just doing it privately. They're broadcasting their thoughts to the world via YouTube, and those thoughts range from the grief-stricken to the tasteless. First comes the shock, such as this gentleman's reaction:

Then the befuddled grief kicks in, as the scale of the outrage begins to register:

Almost immediately, folks start to wonder about the political ramifications. This gentleman's already worrying whether Muslims will suffer reprisals:

This lady's ready to share every expletive she's ever learned:

Someone's already found a way to blame Obama:

And the first tasteless joke has already appeared. Curiously, this guy had no problem slapping his name on at the end, and even thanked his wife for the inspiration:

As we've always said, every major news event has a Google (GOOG) angle. When you combine the exhibitionism of human nature with technology that empowers people to broadcast every thought to the world, Google even finds a way to be relevant to a massacre in Texas.

Shady hedge fund honchos, beware. That's the message the business press declares this morning in its coverage of new charges brought down yesterday against 14 money managers, Wall Street lawyers, and other well-connected investors with ties to the Galleon insider-trading probe. The Wall Street Journal describes their alleged criminal dealings as something out of a James Bond movie, "including packages of money, throwaway cellphones, a ringmaster nicknamed 'Octopussy' and an associate called 'the Greek.' " The New York Times adds the racket "was pierced in part through surveillance and wiretaps." The subterfuge enabled the band of conspirators to net a cool $20 million in profits from dodgy "inside" trades, prosecutors say.

The case came to light last month after federal authorities charged hedge fund tycoon Raj Rajaratnam, founder of Galleon Group, and five others with masterminding a vast insider trading racket. And, the NYT reports, more arrests are expected in the coming weeks as a special FBI unit expands its broader probe into the more murky dealings of hedge funds. Where might the wire take investigators next? "For the first time, the authorities hinted that they might be brushing against the pinnacle of the hedge fund world, S.A.C. Capital Management, a $12 billion Connecticut fund company," the NYT writes, adding, "neither S.A.C. nor any current employee has been charged with wrongdoing."

Elsewhere on Wall Street Thursday, there was reason to celebrate. The Dow once again topped the 10,000 mark after its biggest one-day rise since July. "Today's big news was that we saw fewer claims for unemployment benefits," said Mike Stanfield, chief investment officer at VSR Financial Services, told CNNMoney.com. "That suggests that the underlying economics are continuing to improve." Ah, but of course we've been here before. The Dow has been wildly gyrating above and below 10,000 for much of the month. But there is some cause for sustained hope this time. According to the WSJ, the Labor Department reported on Thursday that U.S. worker productivity improved at its most vigorous rate since the Kennedy administration "even as employers pushed forward with layoffs and cuts in working hours across a wide range of industries."

Ever since the government threw billions of dollars at the financial system last year, pols and analysts have been trying to work out where exactly the money went, who really benefited and whether the policy worked. Well, according to the NYT, one side effect was to allow "a handful of giant institutions to save up to $25 billion on their borrowing costs," including General Electric Capital ($1.9 billion in savings) and Goldman Sachs (GS) ($606 million) as well as smaller sums for Citigroup (C), Bank of America (BAC), and Morgan Stanley (MS). The savings were part of the $4.3 trillion safety net and came in the form of "federal guarantees on more than $300 billion of bonds issued by banks and other financial institutions." But before we get too outraged, it turns out the government has turned a profit on this risky business, collecting $9 billion in fees for guaranteeing the bonds.

To the world of Big Oil now and news that, six years after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Iraq has agreed a series of new foreign consortium deals to reinvigorate its sleeping giant of an oil industry. On the heels of a big deal earlier in the week with BP (BP) and China National Petroleum Company, Iraq's Oil Ministry has granted the first  drilling concession to a U.S. company in the form of consortium deal led by Exxon Mobil to develop the West Qurna-1 oil field (holding an estimated 8.7 billion barrels of reserves) in the south of the country. Exxon, working with Royal Dutch Shell, offered the highest bid and beat out rival consortiums led by OAO Lukoil, ConocoPhillips (COP), and CNPC.

And finally, how is it that employees of Wall Street's most powerful firms were first on the list to get the precious rations of the swine-flu vaccine? According to the WSJ, "Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and Citigroup Inc. are among several large New York City employers that got doses of the H1N1 vaccine," prompting an uproar over how the doses should be distributed to the public. As a result, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning regional health officials around the country now to distribute the doses to high-risk groups first. And, no, "high-risk" does not necessarily mean bailed-out financial firms.

Yesterday was D-Day for Chrysler and Fiat’s CEO, Sergio Marchionne, to present his five-year plan for Chrysler. Reportedly, for more than six hours, Marchionne and his lieutenants PowerPointed their way to the future. There was much live-blogging and tweeting of this event, which sounds as though it was astonishingly dull and intensely granular, if utterly necessary given the relative lack of information that’s emerged from Fiat-controlled Chrysler since the company emerged from bankruptcy.

The New York Times provides a breakdown. What’s most important is that Chrysler isn’t currently burning through as much money as some have speculated; it still has almost $6 billion cash on hand. It also figures it will be making $5 billion a year in profit by 2014 and raise its market share from a current 8 percent to 14 percent (just for perspective, General Motors' market share is currently about 20 percent).

The strategy for achieving what some might call patently ridiculous goals is as follows: Fiats will be sold as Dodges, Fiats will be sold as Chryslers; Fiats will be sold as Jeeps; Ram has been re-styled as a stand-alone truck brand; and $3 billion in savings will be achieved through combined Fiat-Chrysler purchasing. The IPO won’t come until 2011

If you were to accuse Fiat of setting Chrysler up to function, essentially, as a Fiat re-badging and distribution channel in North America, no one would say you were too far off the mark.

The Fiats that are coming, and that will be sold as Chryslers, Dodges, and Jeeps, are going to be strange machines, Italo-American hybrids, Chrysleriats. What they may very well have going for them is a certain design flair and more fuel-efficient engines, which will matter by 2014, when the EPA’s new CAFE standard of 35.5 mpg across vehicles fleets will come on line. What they won’t necessarily have going for them is enough brand identity to yield a wildly ambitious 14 percent market share. Consider that at the moment, there is exactly one Fiat vehicle that’s generating excitement in the United States: the BMW Mini-killing 500, scheduled to arrive late next year.

But we’ll see. Marchionne has already proven himself to be an adventurous global manufacturing executive. Now he’s shown that he can also lay out a very detailed battle plan. He’s sort of like Eisenhower and Montgomery, rolled into one appealing rumpled, be-sweatered and chain-smoking package. Now we’ll see whether he can also do Patton and take his plan to the field.

As an aside, there’s something kind of amusingly out-of-sync with Marchionne and the way this first big media statement of Chysler’s recovery was staged. It consumed nearly an entire working day and constituted a marathon press conference. Something like that doesn’t really fit with the Twitter-fied ways that these events are now covered. And yet, Twitter they did. But Chrysleriat rolled out so much detail it was impossible to live-blog or Twitter any kind of theme or theory. For this kind of big-B Business presentation, even old-school journalism struggles to lay it all out in a coherent way. Chrysler’s plan is actually the type of thing that cries out for lengthy study, so that the key elements can be focused on.

This could be a signal of the way that Marchionne intends to do business with the media—not briskly, but in accountant-level detail. You could see this as a kind of CEO jujitsu, creating a condition of semi-permanent confusion in auto- and business media that just want to know, know, know. It’s clever, it’s serious, and it’s new. But in terms of seeing the auto industry as a form of entertainment, it’s a thorny new challenge.

In case you missed the news, Kellogg (K) announced on Wednesday that it would "phase out" claims on boxes of Rice Krispies and Cocoa Krispies that the cereals boost children's immunity to disease.

"It's a cold environment for food marketers trying to make health claims," Advertising Age concluded, perhaps somewhat prematurely, given that plenty of foods still claim, for example, that they are low in fat while not mentioning how high in sugar or calories they are. Maybe better to say it's a cold environment for truly insane health claims like this one.

Kellogg is reacting not only to widespread media ridicule, but to threats both explicit and implicit from government officials. But the company says it's doing it "given the public attention to H1N1" (which is sort of beside the point).

To save face, Kellogg continues to insist that "science shows" that the addition of a few vitamins "helps boost a child's immunity." The company's statement, like the initial label claim, made no mention of bananas or carrots and how much better they are than Cocoa Krispies as vitamin-delivery vehicles.

Google's (GOOG) leaders have always had something of a tin ear when it comes to apprehending how afraid people are of its power and ubiquity. Ken Auletta's new book, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, has a case in point. When the company's engineers rolled out Gmail, they were delighted to announce that each user had virtually unlimited memory storage, so no one had to delete e-mail to free up space. Why, they asked themselves, do we need a delete function? After all, it just clutters up the page and distracts people.

In a classic case of thinking like an engineer, the Googlers had no idea that the public would be appalled at this. People were already spooked at the idea that a Google bot would be scanning their e-mails, looking for keywords to pin ads next to. They had to have control over their private communication, advisers warned Google's leaders. Astonishingly, Larry Page responded by saying, "We want them to start thinking differently."

That didn't last long. The Electronic Privacy Information Center called for Gmail to be shut down as a threat to basic Internet privacy, and the befuddled engineers had to restore the delete function. Unless people can control how much personal information Google collects, it seemed, they would regard the company as Big Brother.

Today, Google debuts its latest effort to mollify such privacy concerns. The company has launched Google Dashboard, a navigable list of all the information (search terms, YouTube videos you watched, etc.) that it has collected about you. From now on, users can look over all the personal data they've inadvertently shared with Google, delete anything that makes them uncomfortable, and change privacy settings to limit Google's, shall we say, curiosity. Here's a little film that shows how Dashboard works.

Clearly, Dashboard is an acknowledgement that folks are uncomfortable with Google's virtual panopticon. But are they? CNet reporter Matt Asay argues that the vast majority of people won't bother to use Dashboard, because at the end of the day, they're worked up over privacy only in the abstract. "For all our hand-wringing over privacy—and for good reason—the reality is that most of us, most of the time, really don't care," he writes. "Or, rather, if accessing useful services or getting work done more efficiently requires some privacy concessions, we gladly concede."

And this will only work in Google's favor more over time. Take privacy concerns over cloud-based computing, for example: "Am I concerned about Google snooping on the documents we write and store in Google Docs? Let's just say I worry more about my time fixing [Microsoft] Office than whether Google gleans any information from my 12-year old's seventh-grade essay."

So will people actually use Dashboard to lock out Google's prying eyes? Or will they shrug their shoulders and go on with their day? Only time will tell.

I did a short interview with RT (a Russian English-language TV network) about the failure of General Motors’ sale of Opel to Magna International and Sbrebank, a Russian bank. They’re not happy in Germany, and they’re not happy in Russia. But from what I can gather, they are happy in Detroit. I continue to think that it’s pretty cut-and-dried: GM’s board doesn't want to lose Opel's (and in the UK, Vauxhall’s) European operations, but it also must think that it can get restructuring funding for Opel out of the German government, and it may plan to use jobs as leverage.

BusinessWeek has put together a slide show of the “Fifty Ugliest Cars of the Past 50 Years” that has the auto blogosphere scratching its collective head. There are some usual suspects: the Pontiac Aztek, the Yugo, the Cadillac Cimarron. But there’s also the Ferrari Enzo, the Chevy El Camino, the Volvo 240, the Aston Martin Lagonda, the Honda Element, and the Toyota Prius, as well as some offbeat models, such as the Corbin Sparrow. Particularly disturbing is BizWeek’s apparent hatred of El Camino derivatives: any non-truck-like car with a bed, including both the Subaru Brat and Baja, gets clonked. But the El Camino is one of the greatest cars of all time. It’s good to be both a car and a truck!  It lives on, in fact, in Australia. Also, taking a whack at the Tata Nano is a cheap shot—this is a car that has to revel in its inexpensive smallness. Finally, BusinessWeek could have been sharper with the lingo. The DeLorean DMC-12 makes the list, but its rear is referred to as “especially disconcerting with its window shading and cubed tail lights.” Window shading? That’s a louvered back window, sometimes called a “backlight,” gentlemen.

Despite its status as the most successful PC operating system of all time, Microsoft's Windows has always struggled with a serious image problem. The Big Money's Win Rosenfeld takes a look back at the history of the company's commercial catastrophes.

Disney’s (DIS) signature cartoon character Mickey Mouse is getting a makeover, says today’s New York Times. Concerned that kids these days aren’t connecting with the character as much as older generations did, the media and entertainment company is planning to update Mickey by making him edgier. The paper explains, that  in his new personality, “the formerly squeaky clean character can be cantankerous and cunning, as well as heroic …” The new version of the mouse will make his debut in a new video game to be released next year called Epic Mickey. The redesign is a big move and one that the company is making cautiously, the paper explains: “Disney executives are treading carefully, and trying to keep a low profile, as they discuss how much they dare tweak one of the most durable characters in pop culture history to induce new generations of texting, tech-savvy children to embrace him.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that chipmaker Intel (INTC) now faces antitrust charges from the New York attorney general’s office. The suit accuses Intel of using threats and “billions of dollars in kickbacks” to persuade tech companies to use its products. The paper says, “Though the charges are familiar, the latest complaint increases the pressure on Intel, which has already paid a $1.45 billion fine to antitrust authorities in Europe and faces an investigation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.” This new complaint also brings to light e-mail correspondences between executives at Intel and other companies, as well as offering up estimates for just how much Intel may have paid to maintain business with its partners.

More than a quarter of all businesses are owned by women, according to a report from the Center for Women’s Business Research discussed in the New York Times. The center’s report also revealed that a mere 4.2 percent of all revenue generated from U.S. businesses comes from those owned by women, and that only one-fifth of these businesses have employees. So while the seeds of leadership are there, women-owned business development still has a ways to go. The paper says, “Armed with the new research, center officials and other women business leaders are approaching the Obama administration, the Small Business Administration and House and Senate small-business committee members to ask for more resources and new programs to support women-owned businesses.”

The Federal Reserve will most likely keep interest rates at near-zero for the next six months, the Financial Times says. While that's nothing new, the paper notes that the Fed has changed its tune ever so slightly, reporting that “… [t]he US central bank tweaked guidance in its policy statement that had been unchanged since March, edging away from a simple forecast that it expects to keep rates at “exceptionally low levels” for an “extended period” – commonly understood to mean at least six months.” Now, the Fed has spelled out the conditions that could prompt it to raise rates earlier, including “low rates of resource utilisation, subdued inflation trends and stable inflation expectations.”

Automaker Chrysler, still building itself up since its government bailout and hasty partnership with Fiat, has embraced a softer tone, the New York Times reports. At a meeting yesterday, its executives spoke in a “subdued” and “understated” way about the company’s financials and future plans. “Many in the audience remarked on the decided lack of sizzle from an automaker that once sponsored a ‘Lingerie Bowl’ of women playing football in underwear,” the paper says. Sean McAlinden of the Center for Automotive Research told the Times, “They were the ones who mixed the drinks, wore turtlenecks and told all the best jokes … They let the G.M. and Ford (F) guys wear the gray suits, but I guess things have changed.”

Finally, toys are the new Hollywood A-listers, according to the Wall Street Journal. The paper explains that as toys like Stretch Armstrong and the Transformers steal the spotlight in feature films, they’re increasingly getting treated like star actors in Tinseltown. “Toys now are receiving the same A-list treatment that any bankable movie star here has come to expect,” the article says. “That includes top billing and contracts with special perks. They even have their own talent agents.”