The good news? The credit markets are loosening up and banks are lending again. The bad news? They're lending to themselves.

Bank of America and other banks are pumping $1.28 billion into the ailing bank's state-of-the-art ultra-green skyscraper in midtown Manhattan, more than the original amount secured for the building's construction. Bank of America is footing the bill for half of the current loan; the other half comes from Bank of new York Mellon Corp., Wells Fargo, Westdeutsche Immobilien Bank and Helaba Bank.

It's being touted as the first major real estate financing deal to go through since the bottom fell out last year, which is, of course, encouraging news. It's also a source of $30 million a year in revenue for the city and the state, much of which goes to funding the MTA--aka, New York's desperately (and, IMHO, infuriatingly) rusty transit system. So, infrastructure support for public transit. Again, a cause for celebration.

But there's something unsettling about the nature of the recipient. Doesn't Bank of America owe the government some $45 billion? How could they possibly lend hundreds of millions of dollars to themselves at this point--for real estate, of all things? I bounced the idea off Steve Ellis, VP at Taxpayers for Common Sense. Here's what he had to say on the matter:

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I received a rather alarming McKinsey Quarterly report today, which analyzed job prospects in America. McKinsey calculated that 75 to 85 percent of the average American’s pretax income comes from wages from labor (rather than investments). Given the hit that most of our portfolios have taken of late, I’m actually surprised it wasn’t higher. In any case, that puts a lot of pressure on people to earn more if they want to increase their standard of living.

The problem is that 71 percent of us are now working in jobs where demand has been significantly reduced in recent years, and supply of workers has increased, thanks to all the usual reasons (technology, migration, de-unionization, etc). The upshot – we are now very much at risk for yet another jobless recovery, this time one that shuts out not only low end workers, but the middle classes as well.

There were no silver bullets in the report, aside from the obvious – try to join the ranks of companies like McKinsey, which are getting more and more of their revenue from abroad…

This is brilliant: using email traffic to predict a coming crisis. Two computer scientists in Australia got their hands on 517,000 emails sent by Enron employees in the 18 months before the company's demise. They found that about a month before the collapse, communications patterns changed drastically: employees got more clique-y.

For example, the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees. [The researchers think they] may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely.

If their findings hold up, it means we could have a better idea of which companies are in critical danger, and we could do so without violating anyone's privacy. The researchers didn't even look at the content of the emails, and didn't even need to know the names or titles of those who did the sending. They merely cared how patterns changed and how groups morphed.

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