No, I'm not going anywhere, and yes, I'll still be writing about most of the same things I currently cover (though maybe with a little bit less emphasis on Washington horse-race politics). There are interesting projects in the works, some of which will incorporate more honest-to-goodness reporting than I've been doing for a while. There'll still be an RSS feed for everything I write, but it'll be hooked to my byline rather than the title "How the World Works."

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Deciphering investor psychology is never straightforward, and particularly so recently, when there are so many potential reasons for fear and panic: our amazingly dysfunctional U.S. Congress, the ongoing European drama, and the steady drumbeat of negative economic indicators. But today's tremors can be tied to the Fed's announcements on Wednesday fairly easily.

The statement released by the Federal Open Market Committee was the most downbeat of the entire year to date. After months of telling us that the slowdown was caused by temporary factors that would ameliorate before the end of the year, the Fed was forced to acknowledge that there are "significant downside risks to the economic outlook."

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Facebook also added a "Ticker" at the top right hand side of the page, which provided a real-time Twitter-like stream of status updates from all my friends. When I first checked it, it was packed with complaints about the new interface change. Judging solely from comments from my friends, people don't want Facebook deciding what's most important, Facebook's suggestions were wrong, irrelevant and insulting, and why oh why oh why can't Facebook leave a good thing alone?

Oh, and people hate change. And, goddammit, they're switching to Google+ (which conveniently opened its doors to the general public today), or Twitter, or giving up on the Internet altogether.

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It's been a long year for Google. In February, European antitrust regulators launched an investigation into whether Google was using its search results to privilege its own services over those of competitors. In June, the Federal Trade Commission started looking into whether Google's relationship with handset manufacturers using the Android operating system improperly promoted Google search. In August, Texas's state attorney general joined the fun. And on Wednesday, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition, and Consumer Rights. The name of the hearing: "The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition?"

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Granholm and I are sitting in a corner office of a building on the University of California at Berkeley campus, where Granholm is spending a year of "sabbatical." She leans over her desk, looks me in the eye, and demonstrates how the the Chinese official rubbed his hands together like a kid unable to contain his glee right before unwrapping Christmas presents. "'Take your time,' he tells me," says Granholm. "'Take your time.'"

She shakes her head as if in disbelief at how short-sighted the American political establishment has become. Her point is obvious, and oft-repeated during the course of our interview: In a globalized world, the U.S. economy will not thrive unless we get serious about targeting strategically important sectors of the economy. The rest of the world is playing the economic development game for keeps, while the U.S. seems willing to abandon the board all together.

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But a look inside the numbers, at the five worst and five best states, is unhappily revealing. The states with the five highest unemployment rates are Nevada (13.4 percent), California (12.1 percent), Michigan (11.2 percent), South Carolina (11.1 percent) and Florida (10.7 percent.) Nevada, California, Michigan and South Carolina all registered unemployment increases in August, compared to July. Florida held even.

The states with the lowest unemployment rates are North Dakota (3.5 percent), Nebraska (4.2 percent), South Dakota (4.7 percent), New Hampshire (5.3 percent) and Oklahoma (5.6 percent.)

The combined population of the five worst states: 73,864,261.

The combined population of the five best states: 8,380,933.

The unavoidable conclusion: Unemployment is bad and getting worse in some of the most highly populated regions of the United States.

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The Financial Times' Joe Leahy reports from Sao Paulo:

Officials from the leading emerging market economies will meet in Washington next week to discuss potential joint action to help the crisis-hit eurozone, said Guido Mantega, Brazil's finance minister. The idea will be discussed at a meeting of the finance ministers and central bank governors of the "Bric" nations -- Brazil, Russia, India and China, plus South Africa -- on Thursday.

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From Bloomberg: "Obama Approval Plummets to New Low Among Americans Skeptical of Jobs Plan."

From the Financial Times: "Obama to Propose Medicare and Medicaid Cuts."

When you are proposing cuts to programs American voters like in order to pay for an initiative that American voters don't think will work, you're in trouble. Even in the unlikely event that Congress approves Obama's job plan, there's still a worst case scenario: The economy doesn't improve, and Republicans running for president get to blame Obama both for high unemployment and for cutting Medicare.

Digging into a couple of other polls that also show growing dissatisfaction with Obama, the Washington Post's Greg Sargent argues that the real takeaway should be that voters are unhappy with the economy, and not the jobs plan. When broken down into its constituent parts, the American Jobs Act polls well.

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• Germany's economics minister warned that, to save the euro, Greece might have to go through some sort of "insolvency procedure." Bloomberg News promptly reported that there is now a "98 percent" probability that Greece will default.
• An Italian bond sale went badly, forcing Italy's borrowing costs sharply higher. Investors were heartened, however, by the news that Italy's foreign minister was begging China to bail out the country with a significant investment. This was the same foreign minister who had previously warned against China's "reverse colonialism."
• The price of insuring against the default of bonds issued by Portugal, Italy and France jumped.
• Bank stocks in France tanked. French banks own about $57 billion in Greek debt -- and much, much more in Spanish and Italian debt.
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel smacked down her own economics minister, and declared that she wouldn't allow Greece to go into "uncontrolled insolvency."
• "I think we will do Greece the biggest favor by not speculating much, but instead encouraging Greece to implement the commitments it has made," Ms. Merkel told RBB Inforadio, a public broadcaster in the Berlin region. "What we don't need is unrest in the financial markets -- the uncertainties are already big enough," she said.
• Merkel's promise calmed the waters -- for the moment. French bank stocks -- and the U.S. stock market -- suddenly rebounded.

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The poverty rate in 2010 rose to an embarrassing 15.1 percent, up from 14.3 percent in 2009. "There were 46.2 million people in poverty in 2010, up from 43.6 million in 2009 -- the fourth consecutive annual increase and the largest number in the 52 years for which poverty estimates have been published," reported the Census Bureau.

The poverty threshold for a family of four in 2010 was $22,314. Overall, real median household income declined by 2.3 percent in 2010.

Put these numbers together with what we already know about how the rich are faring in the U.S. -- the top 10th of 1 percent takes home about 24 percent of all American wealth -- and we have stunning confirmation of what a Citigroup analyst has labeled the "consumer hourglass economy."  The wealthy are doing fine, while the number of those living in poverty grows, and the middle ... the middle is just disappearing.

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Many observers have been predicting this end game since the beginning of Europe's sovereign debt crisis, if only because the austerity forced upon Greece by the terms of its bailout has so damaged the Greek economy as to make it impossible for the country to grow at all. But whatever might or might not happen to Greece has never been the primary cause for concern. European banks own lots and lots of Greek debt. What happens to those banks when Greece defaults?

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FDR's New Deal remains the standard by which all Democratic presidents are judged. The government put millions of Americans directly to work building roads and bridges and schools that still exist today. The creation of Social Security established the underpinnings of a safety net for all Americans. Wall Street's tendency to excess and destructive speculation was reined in by the Securities Exchange Act and the banking system stabilized for generations by federal deposit insurance.

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But you'll be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks Congress will pass the president's plan in anything close to the shape he outlined. Which leaves us with a familiar question: What can President Obama do to boost jobs without Congress?

Here are four ideas:

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The president called for new infrastructure spending, new incentives to encourage businesses to hire, extended and expanded payroll tax cuts for both employers and the employed, help for homeowners who want to refinance their mortgages, and more aid to state and local government. All together, he outlined a reasonably hefty set of proposals. He never specified a price tag, but leaks before the speech suggested that the total cost would come in around $450 billion -- which the president promised would be paid for by additional long-term budget cuts tacked on top of the totals already agreed to by Congress during the debt ceiling negotiations, as well as by higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations.

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What are the most potent things President Obama could do to boost job creation?

No. 1, we need to extend unemployment insurance when it runs out at the end of this year. Not doing that would not just cut off desperate people; it would also be a really bad anti-stimulus for the economy. Unemployment insurance is very good economic stimulus. It gets spent right away and supports jobs throughout the economy.

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These securities were sold pursuant to registration statements, including prospectuses and prospectus supplements that formed part of those registration statements, which contained materially false or misleading statements and omissions. Defendants falsely represented that the underlying mortgage loans complied with certain underwriting guidelines and standards, including representations that significantly overstated the ability of the borrowers to repay their mortgage loans.

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There is, however, one government agency attempting to do its part to boost union power in the United States, in the best tradition of the principles that theoretically underlie Labor Day. The NLRB, a relic of the New Deal empowered to enforce the National Labor Relations Act, has been a busy bee. In recent weeks, the NLRB has issued a series of rulings, that, taken together, make it a little easier for workers to unionize, and a little harder to roll back unions that are already in place.

Most controversially, the NLRB has also brought a complaint against Boeing, claiming that the airplane manufacturer's decision to locate a plant in South Carolina represented an illegal reprisal against its unionized workforce in Washington. The decision precipitated a storm of outrage from the right, and even inspired befuddlement and sharp criticism from commentators not normally associated with the crowd that automatically sees socialism in Obama's every eyebrow twitch.

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One huge caveat: The Verizon strike in August accounted for a net (and temporary) loss of 45,000 jobs. If you add to the calculation the 17,000 jobs shed by government, then the U.S. economy registered a net gain of 62,000 private sector jobs, which, while not robust by any means, still suggests there are some feeble signs of growth visible in the U.S. economy

Elsewhere, the report screamed stagnation, except where it documented decline.

The unemployment rate stayed steady at 9.1 percent. The number of long-term unemployed held at an appalling 6 million. The labor force participation rate and employment-population ratio were unchanged -- both strong indicators of an economy trapped in quicksand.

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Conservatives always warn liberals that "industrial policy" is misguided because the government doesn't have the capacity to successfully pick winners. Solyndra would seem to offer dramatic support for that view. But the real story isn't quite so simple.

As usual, ace green tech reporter Todd Woody provided one of the best early takes on what it all means:

The key graph:

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For some on the right, it's all about the relentless expansion of Big Government -- the "federalization of fairly routine disasters," as Matt Mayer, the president of the conservative think tank Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions, wrote in a blog post for the Heritage Foundation website.

We can leave it to residents of Vermont to decide whether the flooding in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene qualifies as "routine" or not, but there's also another explanation: 2011 has been a banner year for disasters, period. By mid-year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2011 was already one of the most extreme -- and costly -- years on record. And that was before Hurricane Irene.

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