Your customized headlines for Sun, Mar 4, 2012

The help-wanted sign is out in Canton, Ohio, for Chesapeake Energy.

The company that has led the charge in shale gas drilling is looking for truck drivers with licenses for hazardous materials, a purchasing coordinator for oil field equipment, a pipeline technician, a field safety coordinator, administrative assistants, troubleshooting electricians, a tax analyst and more.

BP's settlement deal Friday night puts the oil company one giant step closer to containing the gusher of damage claims that arose from the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill. But BP still faces one major hurdle: the federal government.

In case you haven't noticed, the economy is actually getting better. Noticeably better.

Yes, it's been painfully slow in coming, as we continue to tack against strong headwinds coming from Europe and the Middle East as well as the strong ebb tide created by the wind-down of fiscal stimulus. And certainly the recovery has been halting and uneven.

Andrew Schiff was sitting in traffic in California after giving a speech on gold at an investment conference. He turned off the satellite radio, got out of the car and screamed a profanity.

"I'm not Zen at all, and when I'm freaking out about the situation, where I'm stuck like a rat in a trap on a highway with no way to get out, it's very hard," said Schiff, director of marketing for broker-dealer Euro Pacific Capital.

At 8 a.m. on Jan. 10, Takumi Shibata, chief operating officer of Nomura Holdings, walked into the firm's London boardroom overlooking the Thames to try to salvage the 2008 acquisition of the European and Asian units of bankrupt Lehman Brothers.

The voters on the single, long, twisting block of Deerwatch Drive in western Fairfax County are almost never wrong.

Since their Walney Village development was built in 1999, their neighborhood just south of Dulles airport has picked almost all winners, regardless of political party.

British writer John Lanchester, who recently wrote a best-selling novel about the economic crisis, explains why writers of literary fiction are reluctant to write about high finance:

The third and final reason why the literary [sic] is wary of the financial concerns [is] complexity. ... In order to put the full complexity of these worlds into a story, you would have to explain complicated subjects, and give the explanation however much time and space it needs. But you can't explain in fiction, not like that and not at that necessary length... explanations break fiction. It's fine in small doses, as a dollop of rationale before the main course of drama, but anything longer and the reader wakes hours later to the familiar clanking noise of the milkman delivering bottles to the front door...

Tyler Cowen on "the college premium":

The numbers show a conflicted yet striking pattern. Real earnings for men, 25 to 34, with bachelor's degrees are down 19 percent since 2000, and for female college graduates of that age they are down 16 percent since 2003.

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There is a simple reason health care in the United States costs more than it does anywhere else: The prices are higher.

That may sound obvious. But it is, in fact, key to understanding one of the most pressing problems facing our economy. In 2009, Americans spent $7,960 per person on health care. Our neighbors in Canada spent $4,808. The Germans spent $4,218. The French, $3,978. If we had the per-person costs of any of those countries, America's deficits would vanish. Workers would have much more money in their pockets. Our economy would grow more quickly, as our exports would be more competitive.