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New York, London, and other financial centers were heavily dependent on financial-sector profits. Throw in the technology-driven collapse of the publishing and broadcast industries headquartered in such places, and those cities are likely to suffer devastating blows. Capitals of both politics and commerce, such as Paris and Tokyo, will adjust the best in the new state-capitalist world. Purely commercial centers such as New York and Frankfurt will suffer the most. Without the obscenely rich investment bankers and the legions of well-paid retainers who supported their lifestyles, formerly flourishing parts of these former financial capitals may become as derelict as Detroit or the crumbling industrial towns of northern Britain and Germany's Ruhr region.

A blogger says the issue is more class than gender:

Men have worked as essentially shop keepers and store clerks for a lot longer than they have worked on assembly lines.  There have been waiters forever.  Lawyers are the world's second oldest profession.  Teaching was a male-only profession for centuries.  The idea that men are and ought to be unreflective, grunting, two-fisted louts is a class thing not a gender thing and it is imposed upon working class men by a system that needs them to be beasts of burden.

Men who reject certain values and behaviors as "sissy" or "girlie" are rejecting success, and don't think their bosses aren't grateful.

In a compelling analysis, Richard Posner exposes the Fed`s complacency as a key source of the nation`s housing bubble and ultimately as a major - if not the major - cause of the ongoing financial mess and economic crisis. The fallout has effected all of us, and as Posner notes will continue to do so for some time.

But the housing bubble has varied widely by region. Some places in effect became bubble cities their econoimies premised upon and defined by the housing bubble.

This map charts the housing-to-wage ratios for U.S. metropolitan areas in 2006, the height of the bubble. It differs from the more commonly used housing price-to-income ratio. Historically, housing prices have been about three times income, but by 2006 housing prices had soared to a high more than five times incomes. In Irvine, California, the housing price-to-income ratio soared to 8.6 by 2006.

The housing price-to-wage ratio may provide a better gauge of housing bubbles. Income is a broad measure that includes wealth from stocks and bonds, interests, rents, and government transfers and other sources. Wages constitute a more appropriate gauge of a region's underlying productivity, accounting for remuneration for work actually performed.

Given the right changes, perhaps the United States can develop with the productive long view in mind, and maybe its human talent can be spread more equitably. "When you have more financial engineers than computer engineers, you know that the brightest minds have gone into something where, probably, the margin was excessive," he had told me earlier. "Maybe some of these bright people are going to do something entrepreneurial, more creative, or go into government. I think that's actually a good change. The transition is painful, but the result may be good."

[O]ver the long term, I'm optimistic that the redeployment of US human resources away from finance and into the real economy is bound to be a good thing. But in the medium term, the process of "scaling back and turning inwards" around the globe is going to be extremely painful -- and is far from over. Or, to put it a more familiar way, things are going to get worse before they get worse. Only very slowly and very painfully might they start to get better -- and it's not going to happen any time soon.

The U.S. unemployment rate is nearly nine percent but varies widely by gender, race, and also by state and metropolitan region. The unemployment rate is up in 44 of 50 states, according to new BLS estimates released yesterday. Last month, 106 U.S. metros reported jobless rates of 10 percent or more, while 90 had rates below seven percent, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Greater Detroit posted the highest rate for large regions (those with a million or more people), 14 percent. Ten other regions posted rates in excess of 10 percent. The lowest levels of unemployment were found in greater New Orleans, 3.3 percent and Oklahoma City, 5.6 percent. Greater Portland, Oregon saw the largest jump in its unemployment rate (+6.5 percentage points), followed by greater Charlotte (+6.2 points) and greater Detroit (+6.0 points).

Writing over at Economix, Ed Glaeser previously identified the effects of manufacturing economies and human capital (the share of people with a bachelor's degree or above).on the unemployment rate. But how do these factors and others effect the change in the unemployment rate? So, Charlotta Mellander and I decided to take a look the effects of human capital and the occupational or classstructure on the change in the unemployment rate over the past year or so.

We all know the power of an Apple or a Google to create new business models and generate massive new wealth. But, long ago, the great economist Joseph Schumpeter argued that the formation of new entrepreneurs lies behind the great "gales of creative destruction" which set in place new firms and industries and revolutionize old ones.

The last couple of days, we've looked at how class effects economic growth and innovation. We now look at the relationship between class and entrepreneurship. In the graphs below, Charlotta Mellander compares countries' performance on the Global Entrepreneurship Index developed by economist Zoltan Acs to shares of the creative class and working class.

[D]eveloping countries could invite instant Hong Kongs--new cities in new locations run by experienced governments such as Canada or Finland. They would enrich the country where they are built as special economic zones while also rewarding the distant government that makes the investment of building the new city state and installing a set of fair and productive rules.  Over time, as with Hong Kong, the new city is turned over to the host country.

It's clear that the economic crisis is having uneven impacts on different types of workers and different kinds of communities. Highly educated people and highly educated places are holding up much better than others.

But among the most stable places in the current downturn are college towns.

Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for March 2009, Martin Prosperity Institute researcher Patrick Adler put together the following graph which plots the unemployment rate for various states, major commercial cities, and college towns. The results speak for themselves.

Living through the current economic downturn, none of us take economic prosperity for granted anymore. We're aware now, more than ever, of how important it is to cultivate the things that contribute to long-run economic growth and sustained prosperity as well as to regulate and cope with those which can come to jeopardize that prosperity.

Economists mainly agree that there are two things that power long-run economic growth. Thanks to the Nobel-prize winning work of Robert Solow, we know that technology is one. Human capital is another. Detailed empirical studies by Harvard's Robert Barro and others show the connection between human capital and economic growth.

The slump across global commercial property markets has accelerated since the turn of the year, with the emerging markets in particular struggling under the combination of capital value and rental falls. The pace of decline in capital values accelerated in the first quarter, while almost every country in the world is reporting a slide in rents ...

U.S. household leverage, as measured by the ratio of debt to personal disposable income, increased modestly from 55% in 1960 to 65% by the mid-1980s. Then, over the next two decades, leverage proceeded to more than double, reaching an all-time high of 133% in 2007. That dramatic rise in debt was accompanied by a steady decline in the personal saving rate. The combination of higher debt and lower saving enabled personal consumption expenditures to grow faster than disposable income, providing a significant boost to U.S. economic growth over the period.

In the long-run, however, consumption cannot grow faster than income because there is an upper limit to how much debt households can service, based on their incomes.

Thoma believes this means recovery will be slow in coming because:

... unlike some recent recessions, this time the economy cannot go back to where it was prior to the recession, and the structural change that must occur to move resources out of housing and the financial sector and into other, productive uses will take time to bring about.

Phoenix's housing bust has turned into a quasi-boom, a sign that its market may have hit bottom and a sneak preview of what a national housing recovery could look like.

More homes are selling than at any time since 2006. Prices are slowly stabilizing. Buyers are once again finding themselves in frantic bidding wars -- only this time over foreclosed houses selling at deep discounts rather than ranch homes listing for vast sums.

Business Week's Michael Mandel crunches the numbers and turns up some disturbing results. While recession has hit hardest at blue-collar workers, it is taking its toll on professional jobs as well. Unemployment for professionals overall increased by roughly four percent between August 2008 and April 2009. But the recession is hitting much harder at certain types of professionals. Computing and mathematical jobs (heavy on software engineers, computer scientists, and systems analysts) are down 9.3 percent; engineering and architectural jobs (two-thirds engineering) are down 10.3 percent; and "creative professional" jobs - working artists, musicians, dancers, entertainers, reporters, editors, writers, and other media types - are down 11.3 percent.

The Seattle Times Jon Talton suggests the coffee-maker's ongoing financial problems may be an "artifact" of deeper economic troubles:

"What if Starbucks is an artifact of an economy that's not coming back? A time of rising, if fleeting, American affluence as we moved from dot-coms and telecoms, to day trading and house flipping, all based on the biggest run-up of debt in the history of the world. For this venti, triple-shot America, it might have been the quintessential bubble drink...

Although Starbucks suffered a 77 percent drop in its fiscal second-quarter net income, it actually beat analyst's expectations slightly. Its shares have been generally rising since March and have outperformed the Standard & Poor's 500 Index... Still, same-store sales remain in negative territory, a critical measure for any retailer. For two years, it has underperformed the Dow Jones Restaurants and Bars Index (yes, there is one).

Looking back, Starbucks' fall was a leading indicator of the trouble massing across the land. Now the question becomes whether the America that emerges from the financial shock of the Great Disruption will have the appetite, and the cash, to fund Starbucks' hopes.  How long will Wall Street just wait and see? However the recession has changed America, Wall Street is still in a pre-2007 mindset, and it may demand growth that Starbucks simply can't deliver anymore."

New York and London are consolidating and strengthening their positions atop the global financial system, according to the FT's John Pender.

The latest edition of the Global Financial Centres Index (GFCI) shows these two leading centers to be considerably more "resilient" than others, ranking as the world's only "truly global financial centres."

The GFCI, which is based on surveys of financial experts and professionals, rates financial centers on a point basis. London was on top with a rating of 781, followed by NY with 768. The ratings for these top financial centers fell only 10 and six points respectively since the onset of the crisis.

Tyler Cowen points to a new NBER study that concludes that the shadow banking system is misnamed: it's part of the real banking system and at the heart of the financial crisis:

"The 'shadow banking system' at the heart of the current credit crisis is, in fact, a real banking system - and is vulnerable to a banking panic. Indeed, the events starting in August 2007 are a banking panic. A banking panic is a systemic event because the banking system cannot honor its obligations and is insolvent. Unlike the historical banking panics of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the current banking panic is a wholesale panic, not a retail panic. In the earlier episodes, depositors ran to their banks and demanded cash in exchange for their checking accounts. Unable to meet those demands, the banking system became insolvent. The current panic involved financial firms 'running' on other financial firms by not renewing sale and repurchase agreements (repo) or increasing the repo margin ('haircut'), forcing massive deleveraging, and resulting in the banking system being insolvent. The earlier episodes have many features in common with the current crisis, and examination of history can help understand the current situation and guide thoughts about reform of bank regulation. New regulation can facilitate the functioning of the shadow banking system, making it less vulnerable to panic."

The U.S. lost 563,000 jobs in April, down 100,000 or so from the 663,000 jobs lost in March. But the unemployment rate continued to rise, increasing from 8.5 percent in March to 8.9 percent last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). This brings total job loss to 5.7 million since the onset of the recession in December 2007. (Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported reported that unemployment was "less bad" in April as private companies cut 491,000 jobs, compared to 708,000 in March, according to data from payroll processor Automatic Data Processing and forecasting firm Macroeconomic Advisers.)

But the real unemployment rate is as high as 15.8 percent according to the BLS U6 measure which includes marginally attached and discouraged workers.

And, the impact of the recession continues to be extremely uneven by gender, race, class, and occupation.

Race:  The unemployment rate for whites was eight percent compared to 11.3 percent for Hispanics, 15 percent for blacks, and 17.2 percent for black men.