10 For Tuesday

10 Quick hits for a lazy Tuesday afternoon:

• The Signs Don’t Point To a Typical Recovery (Washington Post) The wounded U.S. economy has shown signs of improvement in recent weeks. But many economists, who were caught off guard by the brutality of the downturn, are accentuating the negative, bracing for head winds that could cause the recovery to be weak.

• 10 Rules (Kirk Report) Applied sports psychology to Trading

• 25 habits of predictably irrational ‘nudgees’ (Marketwatch) “This mood isn’t just about the banks, Public Enemy No. 1. What the Great Recession has crystallized is a larger syndrome that Obama tapped into during the campaign. It’s the sinking sensation that the American game is rigged — that, as the president typically put it a month after his inauguration, the system is in hock to ‘the interests of powerful lobbyists or the wealthiest few’ who have ‘run Washington far too long.'”

• 1.5 Million to Exhaust Benefits by End of ‘09 (NELP) see also Structurally High Unemployment For A Decade

• “Too Big to Fail” Must Die (City Journal) Until the early 1980s, it was generally assumed that failure was a possibility for financial institutions, along with losses for investors who lent to them or held shares in them. Sensible regulation underpinned the assumption. Fifty years of policy died in 1984. That May, the nation’s eighth-largest commercial bank, Chicago’s Continental Illinois, found itself in deep trouble.

• Fed Says Banks Tightened Lending in Second Quarter (Bloomberg)

• Florida population drops for first time since 1946 ( Miami Herald) For the first time since the end of World War II, the growth state of Florida lost population, researchers say, in a sign that the economic recession is even worse than many had feared, according to a new estimate from the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research.

• Credit Crisis Timeline (Credit Write Downs)

• Sachs Appeal: Tim Geithner’s Wall Street consigliere (TNR) Sachs was one of the first economic officials in the door at Obama transition headquarters. The financial crisis team in those days was “shockingly skeletal,” one colleague recalls, and so, it fell to Sachs to survey the wreckage by shuttling between the Fed, the Bush Treasury, and a handful of agencies overseeing the banks. “I’ve got recollections of his feeling grim,” recalls Summers, who had yet to arrive himself. “The more he learned, the worse it looked.”

• The Nichepaper Manifesto (Umair Haque, HBS) Journalists didn’t make 20th century newspapers profitable — readers did. 20th century newspapers were never supernormally profitable because of what they wrote: it was the natural monopoly dynamics of classifieds that fueled massive margins.

Anything else linkworthy I missed?