The Great Slack Attack

Slack—“the unused portion of an economy’s productive capacity”—is apparent across the United States, the Wall Street Journal reports. The evidence: Thousands of unused airplanes, train cars, vacant hotel rooms, and unemployed Americans. Just how much slack is out there and how quickly it will go away is going to be up for debate when Federal Reserve officials meet this week. There’s disagreement within the Fed on the issue. The WSJ says: “Most officials there believe it could take years for the economy to get revving fast enough to put strong upward pressure on wages and prices. Until that happens, inflation should remain under control, and possibly fall, allowing the Fed to keep interest rates low and to concentrate on restoring growth. But some Fed officials have been arguing for months that the central bank is putting too much weight on this argument and risks being behind the curve in combating inflation.”

Banks that charge large fees for overdrafts without asking or telling customers may have to change their ways soon, the Washington Post reports. Congressional Democrats—who championed new restrictions on credit cards earlier this year—are pushing a “crackdown” on these fees as well. Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., plans to introduce legislation that would require banks to get permission from customers rather than allowing automatic overdrafts. “If customers decline and then try to overspend, the transaction would be rejected,” the paper says. On the other hand, “Industry groups argue that customers are responsible for monitoring their account balances, that overdrafts should not happen unintentionally and that overdraft loans—the money advanced automatically to cover the overdraft—are a service that banks offer.”

Disney (DIS) and Marvel Entertainment (MVL) may be newlyweds, but the honeymoon seems to be over, thanks to newly filed claims challenging Marvel’s long-term rights to various superhero characters. According to the New York Times, “Heirs to the comic book artist Jack Kirby, a creator of characters and stories behind Marvel mainstays like ‘X-Men and ‘Fantastic Four,’ last week sent 45 notices of copyright termination to Marvel and Disney, as well as Paramount Pictures, Sony [SNE] Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, and other companies that have been using the characters.”  Kirby, who died in 1994, helped to create characters like the Incredible Hulk. Under copyright law, the author—or in this case, his heirs—can begin a process to “regain copyrights for a period of time after the original grant.” Kirby’s four children could end up with a copyright to one of the characters as early as 2014 and may eventually be able to sell rights to certain characters without permission from Disney, Marvel, or any other studio.

The newspaper business has probably not yet hit bottom, the New York Times reports. Analysts predict that ad revenue will be down about 25 percent from the third quarter last year. That decline should be smaller in the fourth quarter. The 16.6 percent drop in combined print and digital ad revenue last year was the worst since the Great Depression, according to the Newspaper Association of America. Still, 2008 “looks rosy” compared with 2009—when revenue fell 28.3 percent in the first quarter and 29 percent in the second.

Another bright spot of the recession, courtesy of the Financial Times: The recession has caused “an unparalleled fall in greenhouse gas emissions.” The International Energy Agency has found that CO₂ emissions from burning fossil fuels has decline significantly this year—“further than any year in the last 40.” The paper notes that the decline even exceeds the drop-off in the 1981 recession after the oil crisis.

Finally, the Wall Street Journal reports that more unemployed Americans are hiking the Appalachian Trail. While usually about 1,000 hikers leave Georgia each spring in hopes of completing the entire trail at once, this year, trail monitors say, close to 1,400 hikers were in the first wave, and many more followed. The paper says, “Depending on one's level of optimism, an Appalachian Trail through-hiker is either a symbol of a jobless recovery or of a still-deepening recession.”