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Corporate cash piles have never been bigger, either in dollar terms or as a share of the economy.

The labor market, meanwhile, is still millions of jobs short of where it was before the global financial crisis first erupted over six years ago.

Coincidence?

Not in the slightest, according to Jan Hatzius, chief U.S. economist at Goldman Sachs:

“The strength (in profits) is directly related to the weakness in hourly wages, which are still growing at just a 2% nominal pace. The weakness of wages and the resulting strength of profits are telling signs that the US labor market is still far from full employment.

Some of the change is due to demographics, such as the trend toward having fewer children. But a slow economic recovery with high unemployment, stagnant wages and an increasing gulf between low-wage and high-skill jobs also plays a big role. It suggests that government spending on the $80 billion-a-year food stamp program — twice what it cost five years ago — may not subside significantly anytime soon.

Food stamp participation since 1980 has grown the fastest among workers with some college training, a sign that the safety net has stretched further to cover America’s former middle class, according to an analysis of government data for The Associated Press by economists at the University of Kentucky. Formally called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, or SNAP, the program now covers 1 in 7 Americans.

Tal Ater, a web developer in Israel discovered the exploit while working on a JavaScript Speech Recognition library called annyang.

The internet giant seems dismissive of the problem, however.

In a statement, Google said: “We’ve reinvestigated and still believe there is no immediate threat, since a user must first enable speech recognition for each site that requests it.”

In a video he filmed with a voice-over artist, Ater shows how websites that legitimately turn on your microphone to enable speech recognition, can continue to record and listen in on conversations in the background even after you have left the website.

His video shows that every word of the script the voice-over artist was reading aloud has been recorded by Chrome’s speech recognition feature, even after the website has been closed.

According to the video, the information captured from the conversation is then sent to Google’s servers, analysed and then sent back to the website which was originally authorised by the user to record the conversation.

Within earshot

Once the information is in the hands of the website, anything can happen to it, and Chrome’s speech recognition feature can pick up anything said within earshot of the computer once it is switched on and has Chrome running.

The malicious website could hide information being recorded beneath a banner ad, Ater suggests.

The June 2013 disclosure, which Reuters recently reviewed on a website run by the securities industry regulator FINRA, sheds light on the basis for a warning by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on January 8.

The warning, in the form of an intelligence bulletin to regulators and security officers at financial services firms, said that the FBI suspected swaps traders at an unnamed U.S. bank and an unnamed Canadian bank may have been involved in market manipulation and front running of orders from U.S. government-owned mortgage giants Fannie Mae (FNMA) and Freddie Mac (FMCC).

Reuters has since learned that Bank of America’s trading practices regarding Fannie and Freddie are the subject of probes, and that the investigations are ongoing.

Bank of America spokesman Bill Halldin declined comment when asked abut the investigations.

The disclosure on the FINRA site doesn’t specifically accuse Bank of America of any wrongdoing.

“At approximately 12 p.m. yesterday, Carroll County Sheriff’s Deputies responded to a private residence in the 6900 block of Kenmar Lane for a report of an unconscious male, believed to be deceased,” the sheriff’s office reported Friday morning. “Family members reported finding 35-year old Jesse Ryan Loskarn unresponsive in his basement where he’d been residing with family since this past December.

Listeners have told Radio 4’s Money Box they were stopped from withdrawing amounts ranging from £5,000 to £10,000.

HSBC admitted it has not informed customers of the change in policy, which was implemented in November.

The bank says it has now changed its guidance to staff.
New rules

Stephen Cotton, from Worcestershire, went to his local HSBC branch this month to withdraw £7,000 from his instant access savings account to pay back a loan from his mother.

A year before, he had withdrawn a larger sum in cash from HSBC without a problem.

But this time it was different, as he told Money Box: “When we presented them with the withdrawal slip, they declined to give us the money because we could not provide them with a satisfactory explanation for what the money was for. They wanted a letter from the person involved.”

Mr Cotton says the staff refused to tell him how much he could have: “So I wrote out a few slips. I said, ‘Can I have £5,000?’ They said no. I said, ‘Can I have £4,000?’ They said no. And then I wrote one out for £3,000 and they said, ‘OK, we’ll give you that.’ ”