National News

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the economy added 236,000 jobs last month, beating analyst expectations. The unemployment rate fell to 7.7 percent, its lowest point in four years.

Chris Low, chief economist at FTN Financial, joins Marketplace Morning Report host Jeremy Hobson to discuss the details behind the data and whether the new report will affect U.S. monetary policy.

If you're headed to the movies this weekend, you have your pick of the paranormal. There's demon possession, alien invasions, and of course, zombies. The mindless, murderous creatures have experienced a resurgence in pop culture in films like "Warm Bodies," a comedy with a zombie in the role of the romantic lead, and the TV show, "The Walking Dead," a smash in its third season on AMC. Maria Pramaggiore, a film professor at North Carolina State University, says she sees a link between horror movies and personal finance. Scroll over the photo above to find out what Pramaggiore says your favorite movie monster represents financially.

"These zombie films -- 'Warm Bodies' included -- are using death or the undead, that boundary, as sort of the ultimate expression of feeling disconnected, feeling powerless," says Pramaggiore.

Pramaggiore says classic zombies of the '20s and '30s were often exploited labor, working in places like sugar plantations. But more recent incarnations of zombies don't have jobs. They wander and threaten, and ultimately have their bodies destroyed. On the opposite end of the spectrum from zombies -- vampires.

"Vampires are sort of the upper echelon of the horror film world. They're aristocratic. They're European. They wear velvet," says Pramaggiore. "We almost see the vampire as the power of capitalism whereas the zombie figure is really the working class, the plebian. In terms of horror films, zombies are the lowest of the low. They always come in groups. They are in many senses the sort of great mass, the great unwashed, all of those negative terminologies that might be used to talk about the working poor, the working class."

Here's what Pramaggiore says classic horror creatures represent financially:

Zombies -- The walking dead are the embodiment of the "poor, working stiffs." Because zombies can't help what has happened to them, they are symbolic of everyday laborers. They don't call the shots, but rather are the ones trapped at the bottom of the pyramid, representing the dispensable work force.

Werewolves -- What happens when the wealthy stray outside their lifestyles of comfort? They're often exposed to experiences that can change them for better or worse.  In many horror films, people are bitten by werewolves when traveling abroad or to exotic locations. When these jet-setters return home, they have trouble adjusting. Werewolves represent the inability of the upper class to accept the primitive nature within all of us.

Ghosts -- Phantoms are obsessed with property: Just think about it, most ghosts haunt a specific house or piece of land.  They inhabit places in the earthly world with unfinished business. Haunted houses don't fetch much on the open market, after all.

Aliens -- Extra terrestrials are usually smart and powerful -- sometimes, they're even portrayed as superior to humans. Adjectives like those can be used to describe both aliens and your boss. In horror films, humans fear that aliens are more technically advanced and will take control of us. But because aliens don't recognize human emotions, they make decisions solely based on numbers and facts -- much like a middle manager.

Vampires -- The Donald Trump of movie monsters, vampires represent the pompous, upper crust of horror creatures. They are aristocratic, powerful, and often physically attractive (this is where they may differ from Mr. Trump).  They own property going back centuries and can amass wealth endlessly because they live eternally. These blood-suckers are known to be manipulative, magnetic, and nocturnal -- just like wealthy socialites.

Pyongyang steps up its threats in the wake of the latest U.N. Security Council resolutions to clamp down on the North's nuclear program.

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February's jobs numbers were better than expected. The jobless rate is now the lowest it's been since President Obama took office. The rate's recent peak was 10 percent in October 2009.

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The remains of the unknown sailors were found a decade ago in the wreck of the USS Monitor, the United States' first ironclad warship. It sank months after its history-making clash with an iron-armored Confederate ship in 1862.

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The remains of the unknown sailors were found a decade ago in the wreck of the USS Monitor, the United States' first ironclad warship. It sank months after its history-making clash with an iron-armored Confederate ship in 1862.

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In lush Escondido, California, Karen Archipley started an organic vegetable farm with her husband about six years ago.

 “We're looking at rainbow chard, and luciano kale...we harvest this every Saturday for Sundays farmers markets, and now we're selling more to the stores as well,” says Archipley.

 The whole farm is just three acres, but it provides well for the Archipleys, plus a few employees.

 “You can take the size of a parking lot, and make a very good living,” says Archipley, who also tells me about a nearby farm called Amber Waves Organics, run by Ray Shields.

 Shields is retired Navy.

 “This is the lifestyle that I want to pursue,” says Shields. “I want to have a sustainable, organic farm of such a size that I can provide employment opportunities for maybe eight, maybe ten veterans, if I can get them to come there.”

 But traditional farm loans aren't designed for his vision, says Elizabeth Ü, the author of the forthcoming book Finance for Food.

 “Financing either goes to very large scale industrial farmers, or primarily to farmers of commodity crops that aren't even intended for human consumption,” says Ü.

 The big banks that loan to big farms aren't interested in a half-acre of eggplant. And startup farmers like Shields look too risky for most small business loans.

 “A lot of beginning farmers go into credit card debt, because that is the one form of capital available to them,” Ü explains.  

 A new microloan program from the USDA aims to fill this gap. Small, beginning farmers can get up to $35,000, at about one percent interest.

 “I'm seeking to reach out to customers that may have never walked through our doors before,” says Val Dolcini, who heads the California Farm Service Agency, who adds that applications are coming in fast: “A microgreens operation in Sonoma county, a sheep rancher in Solano County, a peach grower in Fresno.”

 In Escondido, Ray Shields has put in his application, to grow organic peppers. He should get about 30,000 dollars, just in time for planting season.

As of Jan. 1, the wealthiest Americans -- those in the top 1 percent -- will have to pay more in federal income taxes. About 6 percent, according to the Tax Policy Center.  That’s the highest rate the 1 percent has paid since 1979. But federal income tax is just one part in the incredibly complicated tax system. Overall, the 1 percent are actually paying less in taxes than they were in ‘79 and the 1 percent looked very different then, than they do today.

Let’s start with the obvious differences. If you were a 1 percenter in 1979 you didn’t have a cell phone or an iPod. You probably had a tape deck that you used to listen to the number one album of the year, “52nd Street,” by Billy Joel. I would venture to guess that your favorite song was “Big Shot.”

From now on I will refer to 1 percenters as big shots. The average income for a 1979 big shot adjusted for inflation was about $413,000.

Jon Bakija was one of the authors of a paper titled “Jobs and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality: Evidence from U.S. Tax Return Data." He says,  “The Congressional Budget Office estimates that all fed taxes were about 35 percent of income for people in the top one percent of the income distribution in 1979.”

That’s the same as the new rate for big shots in 2013. Today the average income of a big shot is $1.4 million.

So let’s say we bring a 1979 big shot into the present to buy a house  in one of the 10 wealthiest zip codes in 2013 America.

If the 1979 big shot follows the golden rule and doesn’t spend more than 30 percent of  gross income on the monthly mortgage payment, it would take the 1979 big shot 30 years to pay off the average house in one of those wealthy neighborhoods. It would take today’s big shot about nine years.

So why are big shots so much wealthier today? Partly it has to do with the people in the 1 percent who work in finance. “You know the Wall Street types the hedgefund types,” says Steve Kaplan, who teaches at Chicago Booth.

Statistically speaking, the percentage of people working in finance hasn’t changed much in the last 35 years. But those big shots who work in finance are earning in 3.5 times more of the nation’s income than they were in 1979.

And much of that income is not subject to federal income tax. When you factor all the taxes other than income -- like payroll, state and local -- the wealthiest 400 big shots in America today pay about 16 percent taxes on their income. Using those same calculations the average American pays 22 percent.

Also: Osama bin Laden's son-in-law due in Manhattan court; the two Koreas ratchet up rhetoric; Catholic cardinals expected to set date for start of conclave; Northeast braces for more snow and flooding.

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Also: Marco Rubio's unusual taste in poets; journalist Nate Thayer is accused of plagiarism; and rethinking book acknowledgments.

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Tell someone that they're acting like a salesman, and they'll probably take it as an insult. Call 'em a used-car salesman, and a fist fight might ensue. The reality, however, is that we're all salespeople in one way or another. And if you're not selling yourself and your ideas, you may be missing the boat both in life and in work. One in nine people in the U.S. workforce are in sales. But Daniel Pink, author of "To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others," says the other eight in nine are in sales too -- they spend an enormous part of their time persuading, influencing, and trying to get people to part with resources like time and effort. Like it or not, we're all in sales now, says Pink.

"We're interacting with people. We want people to see things our way. We want to help people join us in making things a little bit different. And all of those are elements of sales. The thing is, in order to do it well, you don't have to be more sleazy, you have to be more human. You have to understand where people are coming from. You have to make things clear to people. You have to talk in ways that resonate with them and that they can process easily. So this idea that sales is somehow inherently slimy is a relic," says Pink.

Pink says one of the myths about selling is that extroverts make the best salespeople. In fact, strong extroverts and strong introverts are terrible salespeople, says Pink. The people who succeed most are in the middle and known as 'ambiverts.'

"[Ambiverts] know when to push. They know when to shut up. They know when to assert. They know when to hold back," says Pink. "In the distribution of introversion and extroversion in the population, women tend to be a little bit more ambiverted. Women test higher on empathy, which is a facet of attunement and women in general are better listeners."

Nowhere is selling more important than in finding a job. You’re selling your talent, your background and more to a potential employer.  Here are four tips from Daniel Pink on how to make the science of selling yourself work for you:

1. Emphasize potential. 

You might think that the key to landing a job is to emphasize your experience. And, yes, experience matters. But researchers at Stanford University and Harvard Business School have shown that potential can matter more. When people evaluate talent, they often find potential more interesting than accomplishment. Why? It’s uncertain. That uncertainty can lead them to think more deeply about the person they’re evaluating – and this more intensive processing can lead to their generating more and better reasons why the candidate is a good choice.  So don’t fixate on what you achieved yesterday. Emphasize the promise of what you could accomplish tomorrow.

2. Don’t hide every blemish.

Suppose your otherwise gleaming resume has a small scratch – a job that didn’t last very long or a project that went south. Your instinct might be to conceal it. But consider an alternative approach. Stanford University researchers have identified what they dub “the blemishing effect.” In short, adding a small dose of (honest) negative information can be more persuasive than presenting an exclusively positive picture. The minor negative serves as a contrast that makes the mostly glowing total portrait shine more brightly.  But beware: The researchers found that the negative information must follow the positive information, not the reverse. So mention getting fired from that barista job only after you’ve talked about your Nobel Prize.

3. Prepare for the only interview question that matters.

Job interviews, research shows, are surprisingly poor predictors of who’ll make a star employee. Indeed, only one interview question seems to have any predictive value: What do you know about this company? Use this to your advantage by being prepared to answer that question even – especially -- if it never comes up. What do you know about this company? is a proxy for conscientiousness. It demonstrates that you did your due diligence, which signals that you’ll be equally diligent when you take the job. What’s more, a smart response shows that you want to work for this particular outfit – not that you’re merely desperate for a job. Arrive armed with this answer and offer it up even if your interviewer never asks the question.

4. Be a problem-solver and a problem-finder

In any sales encounter, attuning yourself to the buyer – understanding her perspective and interests – is essential. In job hunting, that means understanding your prospective employer’s problem. Remember: The organization isn’t simply trying to fill a seat. It’s hoping to solve a problem – to get code written, pizzas delivered, or patients served.  But don’t stop there. Take a page from the work of the late University of Chicago social scientist Jacob Getzels and the legendary psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In their landmark studies of creativity, they discovered that the very best artists were skilled problem finders. Instead of merely solving existing problems, these artists found new and intriguing ones to tackle. You can do the same: Identify problems your prospective employer doesn’t realize that it has – and you can be an artist of the job search.

Daniel H. Pink is the author of To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others.

This week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average partied like it was 1999, which was the first time the index first closed above both 10,000 and 11,000. But is the financial gravy train going to keep chugging now that we're once again in record territory? Nearly all of us have skin in the game -- our retirement funds, our kids, college funds. Should we be rethinking our investment strategies with the Dow above 14,000? And if we've been on the sidelines, is it too late to get into stocks? To answer those questions, we're joined by Ken Winans, a portfolio manager and founder of Winans International.  

"The markets are moving in a positive direction and there's an awful lot of really good companies that are doing very well right now," says Winans.

Some analysts say we are at the outset of an enormous bull run, so should investors rethink their allocation between stocks and bonds? Go a little heavier in stocks at the moment?

"Yes. Not to be in equities in the long term and not to be in good companies is technically a mistake. Now, you can find corporate bonds out there that are paying 5, 6, 7 percent. For a lot of retirees or people nearing retirement, I think that makes a lot of sense because you will need income when you retire. If you're young and you've missed the bond market rally and you are looking at where [to] put new money, I think you have to lean toward equities," says Winans.

Winans says it's not too late for people to jump back into the market, but he warns that nothing goes straight up. Plus, there's also a seasonal issue within the markets. In April, people will have to pay some large tax bills. Winans says he wouldn't be surprised to see people have to sell some of their stocks to pay those bills -- so there could be a temporary lull going into April. And the continuing budgetary problem could impact the markets as well.

After a special Mass, the closed-door gathering to choose a successor to the now-retired Pope Benedict XVI will begin.

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Facebook has unveiled a redesign of its News Feed, but any social network knows that drastic changes come with risks. Just look at Friendster, a site that fizzled after changes to the interface and a subsequent exodus made it less valuable to users.

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Economists expect to hear that there were about 160,000 jobs added to payrolls in February. The jobless rate likely stayed near 7.9 percent. Slow job growth and stubbornly high unemployment likely continued.

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The Dow Jones Industrial Average has hit yet another all-time high -- and the world is following suit. Global shares are at their highest level since June of 2008, thanks to strong market performance in France, Germany, the U.K., and Japan.

The BBC's Economics Correspondent Andrew Walker joins Marketplace Morning Report host Jeremy Hobson to take stock of markets around the world.

Who is tech? It's a question we're asking all this week as we explore the role of women in the tech industry.

Jessica Lawrence is the director of NY Tech Meet Up, which brings together techies on a regular basis to share ideas and network. Lawrence joined Marketplace Tech host David Brancaccio to discuss the tech community in New York and whether or not the tech world is a boy's club.

Today is the start of the South By Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, TX. What was first known as an indie music gathering and then a music and film festival, starts out this year as very much an interactive, startup, new media hotspot.

"In terms of industry presence, meaning paid registrants, we are now bigger than South by Southwest music," says Hugh Forrest, director of SXSW Interactive.

And with the growing numbers comes growing clout, according to Forrest, who credits a budding tech “cool factor” for the conference’s success.

"Geeks are the new rock stars," he says. "When Mark Zuckerberg gets married it's covered in People. When Steve Jobs dies, it’s like John Lennon dying."

So how do you tell the tech rock stars from the indie music rock stars? Louis Black, one of the original founders of SXSW and editor of the Austin Chronicle, says when you meet a festival-goer, listen to how they talk about funding their creativity.

"Whereas the music and film people [talk] passively about fundraising, all the Interactive people [talk] about what money they have just gotten and what they are going to do with it," says Black.

To hear more about the South by Southwest Interactive, click on the audio player above.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the economy added 236,000 jobs last month, beating analyst expectations. The unemployment rate fell to 7.7 percent, its lowest point in four years. 

While construction, healthcare, tourism and retail were all pockets of strength, government hiring lagged behind.

"But not as a result of the sequester," says Julia Coronado, chief economist with investment bank BNP Paribas. "It was all on the state and local side."

In the coming months, analysts will continue to watch for the effects of the mandatory across-the-board federal spending cuts, which kicked in March 1.

Coronado says that while February's report showed a healthy gain in jobs, it also revealed a drop in labor force participation.

"In particular, young people gave up the search [for jobs] -- that's not the way we want to make progress.”

To hear more about the U.S. job market and the Labor Department's latest report, click on the audio player above.

Girl Scouts and Wiffle Ball players may be happy about the Transportation Security Administration's big announcement this week that, starting in late April, passengers will be allowed to carry small pocket knives and certain sports equipment on to planes, after those objects were banned in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. But flight attendants are decidedly unhappy about the announcement. 

“It’s a bad idea,” says Veda Shook, President of the Association of Flight Attendants. She says under the new rules, which would allow knives less than 2.36 inches long and a half inch wide, a passenger could still “do some serious damage.” Shook, who is a flight attendant for Alaska Airlines, also questions the need for the rule change. “It's not like there's this outcry to bring knives on board,” she says. 

The TSA declined an interview, but issued a statement saying the new rules will allow them to "better focus their efforts on finding higher threat items such as explosives."

That logic makes sense to Doug Laird, an airport security consultant and former director of security for Northwest Airlines. 

“You can’t protect against everything,” Laird says. “I would much rather see the TSA trying to find the components of IED's than worrying about looking for a Swiss Army Knife.”

Still, flight attendants are taking their case to Capitol Hill, and have the support of federal air marshal and law enforcement groups. 

As for the Wiffle Ball bats, Flight Attendant Association president Shook says she isn’t concerned with bringing them back in to the plane cabin -- unless, she jokes, she had to “actually hit a Wiffle Ball with one.” But Shook objects to lumping a lightweight plastic bat into the same category as something she worries could be used as a weapon against flight attendants and passengers. 

“It’s a distraction,” Shook says, “intended to take our eye off the blades that are coming back on board.”

See the TSA's new guidelines in the slides below (via TSA):