The latest US unemployment figures, as reported here, are a real worry. The jobless rate has climbed to 9.5% and shows no sign of slipping back. What that's telling us is the situation is getting worse. It's nowhere near as promising as the optimists claim. As the Economic Policy Institute claims, it's the first time since the Great Depression that all jobs growth from the previous business cycle were wiped out. Completely. There are now 14.7 million unemployed workers in the US, up 7.2 million from the start of the recession and it keeps going up.

The Financial Times points out the obvious in this republished form here: "It is incredible that 19 months into such a nasty recession plenty of economic indicators are still getting genuinely worse."

The manufacturing figures tell the same story. As the FT notes, inventories are falling but so are orders. "Manufacturers of oil, mineral, wood, paper and plastic products, for example, are mostly reporting growth. Companies that make things consumers want on the other hand, such as furniture, textiles, cars and electronics, are still uniformly gloomy. That is worrying."

For all the talk of recovery, all signs are saying things are getting worse.

Seems like regulators are finally dealing with bribers and cheaters. But they're taking their time.

Two years after Siemens executives were convicted of paying bribes to get business, the World Bank has announced it will impose a $100 million penalty on the German conglomerate and bar it from getting any World Bank business for two years, and our years in Russia.

In April, Siemens revealed it had been barred from the United Nations procurement division database for six months.

These penalties are unlikely to hurt Siemens bottom line. Which raises the question of whether the company has had any real incentive to fix itself, as it's claimed. Will the penalties work? Let's watch this space.

Hard to go past Matt Taibbi's piece in Rolling Stone where he accuses it of engineering every market manipulation since the Great Depression.

Taibbi doesn't pull any punches either. He calls it the "Wall Street bubble mafia". He writes: "If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain - an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

"They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s - and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet."

He talks about how Goldman honchos infiltrated the US Government. Names include former Bush treasury secretary Henry Paulson and Bill Clinton's former treasury secretary Robert Rubin who spent 26 years at Goldman ("Rubin was the prototypical Goldman banker. He was probably born in a $4,000 suit, he had a face that seemed permanently frozen just short of an apology for being so much smarter than you, and he exuded a Spock-like, emotion-neutral exterior; the only human feeling you could imagine him experiencing was a nightmare about being forced to fly coach.")

And when Paulson announced the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, Taibbi reminds us how Goldman Sachs converted from an investment bank to a bank-holding company, a move that allowed it access not only to $10 billion in TARP funds, but to a whole other publicly backed funding, including lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve.

Some of this stuff is over the top but it's a good read. My only issue with the piece is that it ignores many of the villians who created the meltdown. Moderation is not Taibbi's strong point but hey, it reads well.

And the Empire has struck back. Reuters blogger Felix Salmon has a response from Goldman Sachs flack Lucas van Praag attacking the piece. "Taibbi's article is a compilation of just about every conspiracy theory ever dreamed up about Goldman Sachs, but what real substance is there to support the theories? We reject the assertion that we are inflators of bubbles and profiteers in busts, and we are painfully conscious of the importance of being a force for good."

California has entered the new financial year in crisis with a budget deficit of $26.3 billion, up from $24.3 billion, because of the ineptitude of the legislature in missing a deadline and political incompetence of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The state has an unemployment rate of 11.5%, higher than the national figure, and there have mass foreclosures. As the San Francisco Chronicle tells us, they just have one month to balance budget. If they fail to do that, the deficit blows out by another billion dollars.

The state plans to issue IOUs but the banks are saying there's no guarantee they'll honor the bits of paper. California Controller John Chiang says that without the IOUs, the state will run out fo cash by the end of the month.

The San Jose Mercury News blames the Governor for being too inflexible and refusing to compromise.

California is in a diabolical mess and Standard & Poor's has warned it may cut the state's rating if it doesn't find a solution.

And with the world's eighth largest economy approaching financial oblivion, it's likely to drag the rest of the United States with it. There can be no recovery without California. As Harold Meyerson writes in the Washington Post, Americans have a stake in the California economy getting fixed. "A California that decimates itself during recessions drags the rest of the nation down with it,'' Meyerson writes.

Fascinating to read the report of scientists warning Congress about "climate alarmism". It's fascinating because the crew includes retired manager for strategic planning at ExxonMobil Roger Cohen.

Are ExxonMobil's footprints all over this? Maybe, when The Guardian reveals damning evidence that the world's biggest oil company has been pouring money into lobby groups campaigning against environmentalists and questioning whether global warming exists!

Just days following his death, Michael Jackson's albums sold at 100,000 apiece, according to news reports. And according to preliminary sales numbers from Nielsen SoundScan, as reported here, there were 2.6 million downloads of his work in just one week. The week before, only 48,000 Michael Jackson songs were sold. What makes it even more extraordinary is that no artist has had more than one million downloads. The Wall Street Journal tells us that more than 400,000 of his albums were sold in the four days after his death.

Not that any of this will help clear up the estate or fix the financial problems. Jackson reportedly died more than half a billion dollars in debt and Associated Press reports he only had assets of just over $230 million.

Which suggests the matter might be headed for bankruptcy court. And certainly, the bankruptcy of Jackson's parents 10 years ago won't help their case.

Jackson had the most weird existence. It's not surprising that the weirdness continues after he has gone.

Much has been said about Bernard Madoff's 150 year prison sentence. The Los Angeles Times points out the obvious: his sentence is a lot shorter than what was handed out to the likes of Denis Kozlowski (8 to 25 years), Bernie Ebbers (25 years) and Jeff Skilling 24 years and 4 months).

Madoff's attorney Lee Sorkin has described the sentence as "absurd". Appearing on the Today, and as reported in the Huffington Post, Sorkin said the sentence did not make sense. "My reaction is the justice system is not based on vengeance and it's not built on symbolism... 150 years is absurd under the guidelines under the sentencing statutes."

Slate says there are good pragmatic and symbolic reasons for the sentence. "In cases where the accumulation of life sentences has no practical effect-for example, in states where life sentences don't include the possibility for parole-courts assign multiple life terms for a few reasons. First, in a case with multiple victims, each family might find solace in knowing the criminal received a specific punishment for each crime. Second, the prosecutor might want multiple sentences on the books in case some were overturned on appeal. Third, the court could use back-to-back sentences to emphasize the crime's severity to the governor or the board of pardons."

So what can Madoff expect now that he will spend what's left of his life behind bars. As the Guardian tells us, he is likely now to be paid anywhere from 12 cents to 40 cents an hour for such jobs as food service, cleaning, filing, factory work, teaching or, if he is lucky, shifts in the prison library. And he will probably be sent to a medium to high security prison and get a hard time from other prisoners wanting to make a name for themselves. "If they see an opportunity to take that man out and be in the paper and make a name for themselves, what do they have to lose," one prison consultant told Bloomberg.

Social networking might be booming but bosses don't twitter or blog. For good reason too.

A new survey, published here, reveals that only two out of the top 100 chief executive officers in the United States have Twitter accounts, only 13 have LinkedIn profiles, 81% don't have a personal Facebook page and not one of them has a blog. That's hardly surprising. One would imagine bosses would be too busy to install TweetDeck or waste their time on Facebook quizzes.

Indeed, why would any boss want to be involved with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Wikipedia? As Newsweek points out, people who run big businesses live in a completely different world and for all the hype, they would find social networking sites next to useless.

"CEOs will never come to the social networks in any numbers. Most have enough reputation problems and they do not need those magnified by people who have nothing better to do than go online and insult one another."

So as expected, Bernard Madoff got the max: 150 years in the slammer for perpetrating his vile Ponzi Scheme. For his part, Madoff delivered a big apology to the victims. But interesting questions remain.

Was there money laundering involved? And if so, wouldn't that make some of his victims perpetrators too? Diane Francis at the National Post says that might be a possibility.

Francis writes: "Here's how money laundering would have worked: Unsavory people, from drug cartels to gangsters or greedy tax evaders, are forced to keep their ill-gotten gains hidden from police or tax authorities in dirty-money havens. In order to get their money out so they can spend it, they hire such people as Mr. Madoff to "clean" their cash. On paper, they "invest" huge sums in capital in Madoff funds in return for 10% a year in dividends. But only the 10%, plus fees for Madoff, are transferred to Madoff so he can pay the crooks in a taxable jurisdiction. In other words, the crooks pretend to give him millions to invest, he pretends to invest it, and he collects big fees for transferring to them 10% every year of their hidden capital."

Now that Madoff has been put away, who else is going to go down? As Robert Lenzner from Forbes notes, bankruptcy Trustee Irving Picard says there are some who got returns of 100% or more, redirected from other people's money. You can bet they'll be targets of the government's continuing investigation. And then again, Madoff's wife Ruth might be looking at a stint in jail too.

Madoff is the poster boy of corporate greed. But he was allowed to get away with it for years. We can blame the incompetent Securities and Exchange Commission turning a blind eye. Surely, the SEC should be brought to account for the suffering it has caused?

And will his sentence be a deterrent? One would imagine that Allen Stanford might be a worried man today, assuming he is found guilty of his Ponzi scheme. Still, as the 24/7 Wall Street blog says, 150 years might not be that big a deal if people think they can get away with it.

"There may not be anyone who can improve on the scale and ingenuity of Madoff's fraud. However, it is a recurring theme in human nature that someone in the next decades will try to create another scheme that will be as elaborate and convincing as Madoff's was. The system for preventing fraud is not unlike the one set up to curtail drug trafficking. The most intelligent and ruthless people often find a way around the law. They can sometimes dodge the consequences for years. A tiny portion of them are never caught. It is easy to be daring when fame and fortune are more important than the worst consequences and being remembered for being lawless is much more rewarding than being remembered for being a good citizen."

Worrying signs are emerging from China with reports that we are seeing the creation of an asset price bubble in that market. There was 4.57 trillion yuan (or about $US670 billion) of new lending pouring into the market but most of that was on speculative assets, not the real economy.

Fitch Ratings now warns that the Chinese banks are an accident waiting to happen. And it will affect all of us.

Fitch warns: "With much of the world immersed in crisis, China appears to be one of the few countries where the financial system continues to function largely without a glitch, but Fitch is growing increasingly wary. Future losses on stimulus could turn out to be larger than expected, and it is unclear what share the central and/or local governments ultimately will be willing or able to bear."

If that's right, China's commodity speculators are just using cheap money to speculate and the spring recovery will be exposed as an inventory spike. That would be followed a big downturn into next year as the stimulus wears off.

The implications for the global economy are massive. Watch this space.