“In the week ending Feb. 28, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 639,000, a decrease of 31,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 670,000. The 4-week moving average was 641,750, an increase of 2,000 from the previous week’s revised average of 639,750.”

Good news, though probably a statistical blip.

The hotel industry is begging Congress to not kill junkets.

NYT: “One leading European banker says a poll showed that the only groups now held in lower regard are prostitutes and convicted felons.”

Only $10 billion in Citibank shareholder left to go. Will there be anything left at 4pm?

Bloomberg:

The U.S. economy shrank in the fourth quarter at an even faster pace than previously estimated as consumer spending plunged, companies cut inventories and exports sank.

Gross domestic product contracted at a 6.2 percent annual pace from October through December, more than economists anticipated and the most since 1982, according to revised figures from the Commerce Department today in Washington. Consumer spending, which comprises about 70 percent of the economy, declined at the fastest pace in almost three decades.

The recession is forecast to persist at least through the first half of this year as job losses mount and purchases plummet. The Obama administration’s attempts to break the grip of the worst financial crisis in 70 years are unlikely to bring immediate relief as companies from General Motors Corp. to JPMorgan Chase & Co. cut payrolls.

“The economy really hit the brakes very hard in the fourth quarter,” John Herrmann, president of Herrmann Forecasting LLC in Summit, New Jersey, said before the report. “We’re in a pretty severe, protracted recession. The economy could continue to struggle into 2010.”

GDP was projected to contract at a 5.4 percent annual pace last quarter, according to the median estimate of 74 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News. Forecasts ranged from declines of 3.8 percent to 6 percent.

The 2.4 percentage-point revision was almost five times as large as the average adjustment, Commerce said.

Think getting out of this mess is going to be easy or painless? After hearing this NPR story this AM driving to work, Obama’s face on the “Hope” sticker on the car in front of me just looked pained and sad.

David Beim, a former banker who is now a professor at the Columbia Business School, has something to say for people who want to pin this whole thing on the banks.

He has a chart illustrating how much debt American citizens owe, how much we all owe — with our mortgages and credit cards — compared to the economy as a whole. For most of American history, that consumer debt level represented less than 50 percent of the total U.S. economy, as measured by gross domestic product.

And then …

“From 2000 to 2008, it’s almost a hockey stick. It just goes dramatically upward,” Beim says. “It hits 100 percent of GDP. That is to say, currently, consumers owe $13 trillion when GDP is $13 trillion. That is a ton.”

This has happened before. The chart shows two peaks when consumer debt levels equaled the GDP: One occurred in 2007, the other in 1929.

And that scares Beim.

“That chart is the most striking piece of evidence that I have that what is happening to us is something that goes way beyond toxic assets in banks. It’s something that has little to do with the mechanics of mortgage securitization, or ethics on Wall Street, or anything else,” Beim says. “It says: The problem is us. The problem is not the banks, greedy though they may be, overpaid though they may be. The problem is us.”

Gold bugs will no doubt remember that one of the key tools for jacking us out of the Depression ditch was devaluing the dollar 40% in 1933 when FDR took the country off the gold standard. Here’s a video with newsreel footage from that period. And here are a couple of charts of US private indebtedness over the last 100 years.And here’s our hope.

Social media entrepreneur Jason Calacanis says the market has bottomed, as he’d predicted.

Worth writing about only because it will be headlines of tomorrow’s NYTimes biz section.

This will be below the headline about Citibank being put out of its misery by the government, of course.

The world’s biggest mutual fund, PIMCO’s Total Return fund, has $132 billion in assets. The fund has been gaining new fans based on its conservative management and steady returns as other mutual funds tanked.

PIMCO is a great reference point for understanding just how scarce gold is, relative to the pool of money that might be scrambling for some ballast amid today’s financial hurricanes.

The ~1000 tons of gold held in the SPDR GLD fund, a gold-backed security that currently constitutes the world’s seventh largest stockpile of gold, are worth only $23 billion.

From Wikipedia.

The board members of the Federal Reserve are becoming more pessimistic about the economy. Bloomberg reports:

Fed officials, at their policy meeting in late January, said the economy would contract between 0.5% and 1.3% this year, far worse than their October projections spanning between a 0.2% decline and 1.1% expansion. The figures exclude the three highest and lowest forecasts of the Fed’s 16 sitting policy makers at the time. If all projections are included, the output forecast ranges from a decline of 2.5% to a gain of 0.2%.

The odd thing about these projections, or those of most private economists, is that they are an order of magnitude less severe than any numbers that real businesses are experiencing at present. (For that matter, last year’s numbers are suspciously mild, with GDP contracting 4.3% in the second half of ’08.)

Car sales are down 30-40% year over year. Housing construction is off 17% versus a year ago. Layoffs each week have doubled versus a year ago. Many retailers are seeing 10-20% contraction in sales. Industrial production dropped 1.7% last month alone. (Off nearly 12% in the last year.)

Virtually the only big name companies that are reporting ANY significant growth are Walmart (+2.8% year over year), McDonalds (+5.4% year over year) and Google (growing 3% a quarter?) The only segments, overall, that are reporting employment growth, very moderate, are education, government and healthcare.

What’s missing? Are we going to see massive downward revisions?