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Shell's 25% premium over BP is largely a result of the Gulf Oil Spill and the effects of the disputes with partners in Russia. The largest part of the difference stems from the oil spill. Shell trades at 7.1 times forward earnings, compared to 5.3 for BP.

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The Obama administration's $38.6 billon loan program using Stimulus funds was intended to create 65,000 jobs. Two years into this program, with half the money disbursed, the program has created a mere 3,545 new permanent jobs according to Energy Department figures. The Energy Department claims its $5.9 billion loan guarantees to Ford Motor Company to produce energy efficient vehicles by upgrading plants in 5 states saved 33,000 jobs. Brookings Institution analyst, Mark Muro, says the administration appears to be counting all the workers at these plants and not the jobs saved. 33,000 is close to half the Ford hourly and salaried U.S. employees. Harvard Business School professor, Josh Lerner, says there is a tendency to do a lot of fuzzy math in these figures. Muro points to the need to set large expectations for short term political calculations. The Energy Department's own figures show 20 "green tech"companies won loans so far under this project by negotiating with the Energy Department. If these companies hire the people they agreed to they would hire 8,050 new permanent workers. Only 10 of these companies have created or saved jobs so far. Of the other 10 some won loan approval only recently. The whole process is time consuming. Even if the Energy Department were to create the 60,000 jobs under the revised estimate, each job saved or created would come at a cost of 640,000 dollars in loan guarantees. Using the figure of $19.3 billion disbursed 2 years into this program (half of the $38.6 billion) and 8,050 jobs created, would give a cost of $2.4 million in loan guarantees for each job created- an astoundingly high figure. Other factors to consider are the additional jobs created downstream by suppliers to these companies as the administration states, and the cost of loans if as in the case of Solyndra a company goes bankrupt. Solyndra received a loan of over $500 million and represents 3% of loan guarantees. The administration and Congress assumed a failure rate of 5-10% for this program. ...

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Dominic Randolph, headmaster of Riverdale Country School, New York City, is skeptical of the value of an education that focusses so much on test taking, IQ and scores, and does so little to build the character and resilience that is so essential to life experiences. He says the ability to handle failure and learn from failure to build a better life is something students fail to learn in the competitive school environment of today.

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An internal IMF document that estimates Europe's banks are short of capital by $273 billion. IMF managing director, Christine Lagarde, tries to downplay the report by saying this is not from a stress test that the IMF conducts. In August, Lagarde, called for an "urgent recapitalization" of European banks. As France's finance minister, Lagarde, steadfastly insisted French banks were well capitalized. France worked hard to prevent requirements for significant capital reserves under the Basel III rules. The higher capital requirements were supported by the U.S.. Simon Johnson said in his blog, that as long as European banks had inadequate capital to act as a buffer against losses, European countries had no safe route for restructuring their debts.

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The largest U.S. bank holding companies, including Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup, and two foreign banks Deutsche Bank and Barclays PLC must submit initial plans for "living wills" by July 1, 2012. The Dodd-Frank legislation requires financial firms to develop plans that lay out how they could be liquidated if they went under in a crisis. This legislation gives the FDIC and other regulators the power to seize and dismantle a failing financial firm, to help mitigate the problems of "too-big-to-fail" firms. The FDIC and U.S. regulators lacked such powers at the time of the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. The FDIC and the U.S. Fed co-wrote the living will rule for "comprehensive and coordinated resolution planning." In all, 124 banks, including 100 foreign banks with U.S. affiliates, which have over $50 billion in assets worldwide, must submit plans and update on a regular basis. Smaller banks will have the deadline extended to December 2013.