Daily Digest 2/26 - Too Big To Jail, Student Loan Debt By School, Large-Scale Hawaiian Sea Urchin Die-Off

• Why Are Harvard Graduates In The Mailroom?
• Student-Loan Debt, School by School
• Given Greek Deal, Investors May Reconsider Sovereign Debt
• Too Big To Jail
• Berlusconi Gives Signs That He Will Be Convicted
• Large-scale die-off of sea urchins discovered off Kaumakani

Follow our steps to prepare for a world after peak oil, such as how to store & filter water

Economy

Why Are Harvard Graduates In The Mailroom? (jdargis)

When it’s time to choose who gets the top job or becomes partner, managers subsequently have a lot more information to work with. In the meantime, companies also get the benefit of several years of hard work from determined young people at below-market pay. (Warner Brothers pays its mailroom clerks $25,000 to $30,000, a little more than an apprentice plumber.) While far from perfect, this strategy has done a pretty decent job of pushing those with real promise to the top. Barry Diller and David Geffen each started his career in the William Morris mailroom.

Student-Loan Debt, School by School (jdargis)

The map below draws on data from the New America Foundation's Federal Education Budget Project, and details the debt loads at more than 1,800 four-year colleges and universities.* State-level averages are color-coded by quintile in the map; click on any dot to find details for a particular school, or use the slider to filter by percentage of students taking out loans. For more details on the data used here, please see the fine print below.

Given Greek Deal, Investors May Reconsider Sovereign Debt (jdargis)

More than 97 percent of the outstanding bonds of Spain, Italy, Portugal and Belgium are governed by local law. In theory, these countries could enact legislation similar to Greece’s and thus pass on the cost of reducing their debt to well-heeled bondholders, rather than to retirees and civil servants.

“When push comes to shove, a government will always favor the interests of its domestic population over foreign creditors,” said Ajay G. Jani, a portfolio manager at Gramercy, an investment firm that is based in the United States and was involved in the restructuring negotiations in Argentina.

Too Big To Jail (jdargis)

The Obama administration and its allies have worked hard to sell its settlement with the banks as one that will have a meaningful impact on the housing market. But nothing could be further from the truth. As Kelleher points out, the United States has “more than 10 million homes under water” (the outstanding mortgage exceeds the house’s value). “Twenty billion dollars doesn’t make a dent in that: one million homes at $20,000 loan forgiveness is it.”

Berlusconi Gives Signs That He Will Be Convicted (jdargis)

The case involves David Mills, who was found guilty of receiving money and was convicted in a separate trial in 2009 by two lower courts, though the case was thrown out in 2010 because the statute of limitations had run out. At a hearing in December, Mr. Mills said that his story that Mr. Berlusconi had paid him $600,000 was a fabrication because he wanted to avoid paying taxes on a fee from another client.

Environment

Large-scale die-off of sea urchins discovered off Kaumakani (thatchmo)

The cause of the Caribbean die off of urchins and coral was never determined, Works said, but what they do know is that urchins play a critical role in the health of coral reef ecosystems and that population crashes may have “important upstream consequences.” Urchins are grazers that keep the algae at bay and a food source for other marine creatures.

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