The FDIC announced the problem bank list, which is one step from walking the plank, being seized and shut down, grew to 884 from 860 in Q4 2010. Problem banks are now 11.5% of the 7,657 banks and savings institutions covered by the FDIC.

From the FDIC press release:

The number of institutions on the FDIC's "Problem List" rose from 860 to 884. Total assets of "problem" institutions increased to $390 billion from $379 billion in the prior quarter, but are below the $403 billion reported at year-end 2009. The rate of increase in the number of "problem" banks has declined in each of the past four quarters. Thirty insured institutions failed during the fourth quarter, bringing the total number of failures for the full year to 157.

The FDIC believes bank failures in 2011 will be less than the 157 of 2010. To date, there have been 22 bank failures in the first 7 weeks of 2011. Projecting the current 2011 closure rate onto all of 2011 would be 167. Wikipedia is keeping a tally of closed banks. This time last year, we had 20 bank failures.

The Deposit Insurance Fund is still in the red and went from a negative balance of -$8 billion to -$7.4 billion.

Here's the weird story. While bank failures and problem banks sprout up like mushrooms, the FDIC is reporting record Q4 profits of $21.7 billion. In Q4 2009, the aggregate commercial banks reported a $1.8 billion dollar loss.

The United Nations is projecting the globe's population to be between 8 and 10.5 billion people by 2050. AFP:

A growing, more affluent population competing for ever scarcer resources could make for an "unrecognizable" world by 2050, researchers warned at a major US science conference Sunday.

The United Nations has predicted the global population will reach seven billion this year, and climb to nine billion by 2050, "with almost all of the growth occurring in poor countries, particularly Africa and South Asia," said John Bongaarts of the non-profit Population Council.

To feed all those mouths, "we will need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000," said Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

"By 2050 we will not have a planet left that is recognizable" if current trends continue, Clay said.

The swelling population will exacerbate problems, such as resource depletion, said John Casterline, director of the Initiative in Population Research at Ohio State University.

But incomes are also expected to rise over the next 40 years -- tripling globally and quintupling in developing nations -- and add more strain to global food supplies.

People tend to move up the food chain as their incomes rise, consuming more meat than they might have when they made less money, the experts said.

The LA Times outlines what happens when a major manufacturer of advanced technology, offshore outsources for cheap labor. Guess what? Their entire design and process turns into a disaster. Such is the tale of Boeing:

Sure, it's immoral to abandon your loyal American workers in search of cheap labor overseas. But the real problem with outsourcing, if you don't think it through, is that it can wreck your business and cost you a bundle.

Case in point: Boeing Co. and its 787 Dreamliner.

The next-generation airliner is billions of dollars over budget and about three years late.; the first paying passengers won't be boarding until this fall, if then. Some of the delay stems from the plane's advances in design, engineering and material, which made it harder to build. A two-month machinists strike in 2008 didn't help.

But much of the blame belongs to the company's quantum leap in farming out the design and manufacture of crucial components to suppliers around the nation and in foreign countries such as Italy, Sweden, China, and South Korea. Boeing's dream was to save money. The reality is that it would have been cheaper to keep a lot of this work in-house.

The 787 has more foreign-made content — 30% — than any other Boeing plane, according to the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, the union representing Boeing engineers. That compares with just over 5% in the company's workhorse 747 airliner.