National Public Radio has some context on the Nobel Prize for medicine awarded to in vitro fertilization pioneer Robert Edwards:

After decades of basic research, he and his partner ob-gyn Patrick Steptoe were able to fertilize human eggs retrieved through keyhole surgery, or laparoscopy, in petri dishes in the lab.

But in 1971, the pair were denied major research funding from the Medical Research Council of the U.K., the rough equivalent of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

How come? Well, at the time there was a lot more funding interest in contraception than fertility treatment. And a recent paper in the journal Human Reproduction says there were shortcomings in the pair's research plan that fanned the doubts of some reviewers, fearful of birth defects, who wanted to see more work in primates before human treatments were tried.

Washington Examiner editorial:

According to Bloomberg News, even as she was serving as head of the congressional panel overseeing the $700 billion bank bailout this year, Warren took $90,000 to testify in a class-action lawsuit by retailers against several of the major banks whose bailout she was overseeing. She told Bloomberg that she saw no conflict of interest, which speaks volumes about her judgment.

By now the notion that underfunded pension plans for state and local public employees are a "problem" has become conventional wisdom on the center right. See, for example, this Manhattan Institute Civic Report, "Underfunded Teacher Pension Plans: It's Worse Than You Think," or this white paper from the campaign of New York's Republican candidate for state comptroller, Harry Wilson. In this context, a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research titled "Should Public Retirement Plans Be Fully Funded" comes as a welcome challenge to some of the unstated assumptions that surround this issue.

The movement by policy types and politicians on the center-right in America to balance the budget at the expense of the "rich" is something we've been following here closely. Now comes word, via Bloomberg News, from Great Britain that the "conservative" government there will "end child- benefit welfare payments for wealthier people." The wire reports that "The decision is a shift for Osborne, who when delivering his emergency budget in June defended keeping child benefit as a universal payment without means tests. It risks angering wealthier voters as the opposition Labour Party moves ahead in some polls."

The article indicates that families will lose the child benefit when one parent earns at least the equivalent of $69,665 a year, which is an example of how flexible the definition of "rich" can be.

Just published in the Journal of Finance is a paper titled "Big Bad Banks? The Winners and Losers from Bank Deregulation in the United States." The authors are Thorsten Beck of Tilburg University and Ross Levine and Alexey Levkov, both of Brown University. From the abstract:

We assess the impact of bank deregulation on the distribution of income in the United States. From the 1970s through the 1990s, most states removed restrictions on intrastate branching, which intensified bank competition and improved bank performance. Exploiting the cross-state, cross-time variation in the timing of branch deregulation, we find that deregulation materially tightened the distribution of income by boosting incomes in the lower part of the income distribution while having little impact on incomes above the median. Bank deregulation tightened the distribution of income by increasing the relative wage rates and working hours of unskilled workers.

The hostility toward Wall Street and the "rich" is more than just a political phenomenon, it's a cultural one, too. That's the conclusion I drew from going to see "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps," the new movie by the strange combination of Oliver Stone and 20^th Century Fox, a News Corporation Company.

The bankers in the film are portrayed as greedy, greedy, greedy. "It seems like greed got greedier," Gordon Gekko says at one point. "Last year 40% of American profits came from financial services. Not anything remotely related to production or the needs of the American public."

"The mother of all evil is speculation," Mr. Gekko says, saying it is "like cancer."

The movie is fictional but aspects of it map neatly onto reality, starting with the $2 a share offer for a floundering Keller Zabel Investments (shades of Bear Stearns).

New York City will spend $27.6 million taxpayer dollars to replace all of its 250,900 street signs with new ones that have lower-case letters instead of all-capitals, reports the New York Post, which says it's a waste of money and a federal mandate.

The New York Times's Joe Nocera has a column about Anthony Scaramucci, the hedge fund manager who asked President Obama when he was going to stop whacking Wall Street like a piñata. Mr. Nocera accuses Mr. Scaramucci of being "in denial." Mr. Nocera writes:

Greed, Mr. Scaramucci conceded, had infected Wall Street during the years leading up to the crisis — but he wouldn't acknowledge what seems patently obvious to most people: that those who gravitate to Wall Street are far less motivated by a desire to, say, supply capital to struggling start-ups than to get really rich.

The New York Times has a comically bad news article attempting to explain to its readers who F.A. Hayek is. The piece reports that the Tea Party has "reached back to dusty bookshelves for long-dormant ideas" and "resurrected once-obscure texts by dead writers." As an example of this it gives F.A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom.

In his weekly address, President Obama touted a solar energy company "made possible by the clean energy incentives we have launched":

I want share with you one new development, made possible by the clean energy incentives we have launched. This month, in the Mojave Desert, a company called BrightSource plans to break ground on a revolutionary new type of solar power plant. It's going to put about a thousand people to work building a state-of-the-art facility. And when it's complete, it will turn sunlight into the energy that will power up to 140,000 homes – the largest such plant in the world. Not in China. Not in India. But in California.

Roger Lowenstein has a column up at Bloomberg News accusing filmmaker Oliver Stone of displaying "hatred of America and of capitalism" in his new movie "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps." I saw the movie earlier this week and have a similarly low opinion of it that I hope to write about as soon as I get some time.What interests me about Mr. Lowenstein's column, though, is the way that it entirely leaves off the hook Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and its 20th Century Fox, which issued the film.

Reuters has a terrific scoop about how big investors are paying former Federal Reserve employees to get the news about what happens at meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee before the news is announced to the general public. The wire service says, "This selective dissemination of information gives big investors a competitive edge in the market."

The wire also quotes Haag Sherman, "chief investment officer of Salient Partners, a Houston-based money management firm that oversees around $8 billion in assets": "The fact is that government today is driving the markets more than any time in recent history and having insight into near-term and long-term plans provides a money manager with a significant competitive advantage," Sherman said.

More:

Fed board staffers who retire even get to keep their pass for the central bank's building, which boasts fitness facilities, a barber and a dining room.

In journalism it takes three examples to create a trend story. Today President Obama will name Peter Rouse as his new White House chief of staff. The New York Times reports that "Intensely private, Mr. Rouse is unmarried and lives alone in northwest Washington with his two cats. (He is a big cat person, friends say.)." That comes on the heels of Mr. Obama's appointment to the Supreme Court of Sonia Sotomayor (divorced in 1983 with no children, not remarried) and Elena Kagan (not married, no children.)

President Obama has been going around assuring Americans that they are safe from unscrupulous credit card companies now that Congress has passed, and he has signed into law, both the Dodd-Frank financial "reform" law and the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure (CARD) Act of 2009.

Two recent pieces of mail from credit card companies are illuminating in that respect. The first comes from American Express, where that exemplar of Middle-American goodness Warren Buffett is a big shareholder. Huge type on the mailing envelope offers "a complimentary $10 credit to your American Express Card account" if the account holder activates a service that "monitors websites and chat rooms where identity thieves are known to buy and sell personal information." Fine print inside indicates that the service costs $9.99 a month. So the "complementary $10 credit" is really a complimentary 1 cent credit, or, to look at it long-term, a fee of $119.88 a year, offset by a $10 credit, for a net yearly cost to the cardholder of $109.88.

A recent issue of the Nation magazine carried a cover article by Thomas Geoghegan under the headline "Ten Things Dems Could Do To Win." The one that really caught my attention was number six: "Give everyone the right to six days of vacation — six consecutive paid working days."

This strikes me as really telling. We're competing in a global economy with China and India, and the Nation's message to Americans isn't "work harder," but "take a vacation." It's one thing for Democrats to make job creation more expensive by calling for an increase in the minimum wage. At least that somewhat aligns incentives; the more hours a person works, the more money they make. This vacation idea, on the other hand, would make job creation more expensive by rewarding workers for not working. I can only imagine the seasonal jobs (beach lifeguard, ski-lift operator) that would come with six days of paid vacation at the end of three months of work.