Your customized headlines for Fri, Apr 27, 2012

President Obama's re-election campaign is likely to have more money than any presidential campaign in history. Republican Mitt Romney's campaign, when you factor in the super PACs supporting him, could have even more money than that.

I spent my first year at The Washington Post sitting about 10 feet away from Binyamin Appelbaum. It was a great learning experience. Appelbaum, who is now at the New York Times, doesn't ask questions so much as he springs traps. And he sprung one on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke at a press conference on Wednesday.

Well, there's at least one virtue to the depressing numbers that Social Security's trustees unveiled last week — they prove that I was right. In February I wrote that the system's finances had deteriorated badly, due largely to the energy price boosts created by the Arab Spring. And so they have: Those increases were the primary factor in Social Security's inflation adjustment hitting 3.6 percent this year rather than the 0.7 percent baked into the trustees' 2011 report. That added significant costs to Social Security, but little or nothing in the way of added revenue to help offset them.

The number of foreclosures rose during the first three months of the year in more than half of the nation's metropolitan areas, even as such activity dipped from the previous year in many of those cities, according to a report released Thursday by the research firm RealtyTrac.

On Wednesday, Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council, released a 17-page attack on Paul Ryan's budget. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner called an op-ed by one of Mitt Romney's top economists "remarkably hackish." Today, Vice President Joe Biden is giving a speech at New York University in which he'll say Romney intends to take us "back to the failed policies that got us into the mess President Obama has dug us out of." And next week, President Obama will appear with the First Lady at rallies -- yes, rallies -- at Ohio State University and Virginia Commonwealth University. In other words? Welcome to the general election, folks.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner pressed China on Thursday to speed reform of its state-dominated banking system, citing it as one of the chief ways the country gains an unfair trade advantage.

—Research finds that office team-building exercises are very effective at breeding alienation and mistrust.

—You can relax now, America: the bacon crisis has passed.

—Inside China's media muckraker.

—There is a new Chinese character for epilepsy to avoid its previous associations with madness and animals.

I spent my first year at The Washington Post sitting about 10 feet away from Binyamin Appelbaum. It was a great learning experience. Appelbaum, who is now at the New York Times, doesn't ask questions so much as he springs traps. And he sprung one on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke at a press conference on Wednesday.

During the recession, the number of Americans on food stamps surged as people lost their jobs and families slipped below the poverty line. That's not surprising — it's how the program was designed to work.