Over the past year the global economy has experienced a massive contraction, the deepest since the Great Depression of the 1930s. But this spring, economists started talking of “green shoots” of recovery and that optimistic assessment quickly spread to Wall Street. More recently, on the anniversary of the Lehman Brothers crash, Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve chairman, officially blessed this consensus by declaring the recession is “very likely over.”

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) – Small companies create more than half of America’s jobs, but the entrepreneurs who drive this part of the economy continue to complain that access to credit two years into the recession remains scarce. Small business owners say banks remain extremely wary of risk and a world away from the carefree lending that inflated an epic boom in housing values that went bust and pushed America into its worst economic downturn in decades.

STOCKHOLM — Americans Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson won the Nobel economics prize on Monday for their analyses of economic governance – the way authority is exercised in companies and economic systems. Ostrom was the first woman to win the prize since it was founded in 1968, and the fifth woman to win a Nobel award this year – a Nobel record.

STOCKHOLM — Americans Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson won the Nobel economics prize on Monday for their analyses of economic governance – the way authority is exercised in companies and economic systems. Ostrom was the first woman to win the prize since it was founded in 1968, and the fifth woman to win a Nobel award this year – a Nobel record.

The elites hate to acknowledge it, but when large numbers of ordinary people are moved to action, it changes the narrow political world where the elites call the shots. Inside accounts reveal the extent to which Johnson and Nixon’s conduct of the Vietnam War was constrained by the huge anti-war movement.

Bank of America employees are reminded every day of how far they still have to go. Just outside the elevators of their vast third-floor command center, attached to the wall, is a cardboard thermometer that shows them inching toward their goal of signing up 125,000 struggling borrowers for a federal program to modify their mortgages.

One day in 1791, President George Washington received a bill for 60 pounds, 1 shilling and 7 pence from his physician friend James Craik, who regularly made the rounds at Mount Vernon. The invoice ran two pages: “Anodyne Pills for Breachy .