Today's monthly jobs report suggests two key pieces of the economic picture are likely to persist in the coming months: High unemployment and low interest rates.

These weekly figures from the census department suggest the number of temporary workers employed by the census peaked the first week of May -- during the same period that the labor department took its monthly jobs survey -- and has already begun to decline.

"I do think that we have peaked," Census spokesman told The Hill this week. "I do not expect it to go back up."

In 2000, during the last census, the census department added 348,000 jobs in May, then cut 225,000 jobs in June.

Meanwhile, state and local governments cut jobs in May. That is likely to continue, the WSJ says.

And private-sector job growth was anemic in May -- 41,000 jobs, down from more than 200,000 in April, and not enough to drive an economic recovery. (The number of jobs in manufacturing and temporary services increased, but the number of jobs in construction fell.)

"Remember, it requires 150,000 to 200,000 jobs [per month] in order to reduce that unemployment rate," Bill Gross, who manages the bond fund Pimco, told Bloomberg News.

The unemployment rate fell from 9.9 percent to 9.7 percent in May, but the decline was largely due to the fact that fewer people were looking for work. (The unemployment rate only includes those who are actively seeking employment.) Before the recession, the rate was less than 5 percent.

High unemployment, in turn, means the Federal Reserve is likely to keep interest rates ultra-low. This is true for a few reasons.

For one thing, when more people are out of work, consumers spend less money. That lowers the risk of inflation, which can be a byproduct of low rates.

For another, low interest rates make it more appealing for businesses to borrow money to drive growth, which creates new jobs. At least in theory.

"[W]e are now in the fourth quarter of economic expansion, with jobs once more being created rather than destroyed," Fed chairman Ben Bernanke said yesterday. "Nonetheless, important concerns remain. One particularly difficult issue is the continued high rate of unemployment."

But dig a little deeper, and the number doesn't look so nice. Almost all of those jobs -- 411,000 of them -- were temporary employees hired to work on the census. Those jobs typically last only for a few months.

The private sector added only 41,000 jobs during the month. It's much lower than what economists were expecting, and far fewer jobs than private employers added in April. It suggests the economic recovery is slowing.

The economy has shed more than 7 million jobs since the end of 2007, though the number of jobs has increased since the start of 2010.

May was probably the peak month for census hiring, Bloomberg News notes. And in the coming months, the census department will begin dismissing more employees than it hires.

The unemployment rate fell to 9.7 percent in May, down from 9.9 percent the month before, the government said this morning.

But that number, like the jobs number, is somewhat misleading.

The unemployment rate only considers people who are actively seeking work and can't find it. In May, fewer unemployed people started looking for work again. That contributed to the decline in unemployment.

But Mohamed El-Erian, the bond-fund CEO who coined the term, says it goes much deeper than that.

Today on All Things Considered, El-Erian tells Planet Money's Adam Davidson that the new normal includes changes to the fundamental structure of the global economy:

The first were the core of the system they held the system together. The second, emerging economies, were at the periphery and tended to be crisis prone.

The financial crisis changed that, as China -- an emerging economy -- served as a key stabilizing force in a global financial crisis that started in the U.S.

The shift has continued this year, as industrialized countries like Greece, Spain and Portugal have found themselves in the kind of dicey debt situation traditionally associated with developing countries.

In the new normal, El-Erian says, the traditional major players like the U.S. and Germany will have less influence. And the likes of India, China and Brazil will have more.

The shift will be turbulent. But, El-Erian says, the end result will be a more stable global economy.

"It is better to have many locomotives of growth in the world," he says.

By Jacob Goldstein

Despite the fact that Haiti has largely fallen off the media radar screen, Google searchers are still trying to answer a basic question Planet Money's been wrestling with: Why is Haiti so poor?

But we've been chipping away at the Haiti question. Here are some of our efforts so far:

* Mangoes, Poverty And Plastic Crates
* In Haiti, A Prime Minister's Lament
* Haiti's High Hopes For Vegas
* Starting From Scratch In Haiti

Hat tip: Gawker

From time to time, we'll offer a special, bonus podcast where we talk to big thinkers about their ideas.

Today, Adam Davidson talks to Ian Bremmer about his new book, The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?

Bremmer argues that free-market capitalism is increasingly conflicting with "state capitalism," where states use markets for political gain.

He cites the recent conflict between China and Google as an example. He says, ultimately, the conflict wasn't about freedom of speech or human rights. It was about China supporting a Chinese search company called Baidu.

"The Chinese government preferred a private company, but a Chinese private company -- Baidu," he says.

Download the deep-read podcast. And please let us know what you think, and who else you'd like us to interview.

BP is looking for ways to better manage "low-probability, high-impact" risks like the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the company's CEO tells the FT.

But those kind of Black Swannish risks are, by their nature, remarkably difficult to manage.

Sure, BP and other oil companies can cut fewer corners. And they can prevent the exact failures from the BP spill from recurring. But what about all the other low-probability, high-impact risks they face?

But, as the Harvard economist Ken Rogoff wrote this week, "Economics teaches us that when there is huge uncertainty about catastrophic risks, it is dangerous to rely too much on the price mechanism to get incentives right."

In other words: If both the magnitude of the risk and the magnitude of its impact are essentially unknown how can the market appropriately price those risks?

For that matter, Rogoff says, it's not clear how "to adapt regulation over time to complex systems with constantly evolving risks." As a result, he argues, "we may be doomed to a world of regulation that perpetually overshoots or undershoots its goals."

Regulation of offshore drilling will certainly get a lot tighter because of the spill. The industry will face more scrutiny from government watchdogs, and higher legal liability for oil spills.

But the problem of low-probability, high-impact risks goes far beyond oil. And, as the NYT's David Leonhardt writes, "it would be foolish to think that the only risks we are still underestimating are the ones that have suddenly become salient."

He cites as possible examples the risk that investors will grow wary of lending money to the U.S. government, or the risk that climate change will be more drastic than expected, leading to flooded cities.

Why stop there? You could add to the list a nuclear blast, a deadly new virus or just about any other radically destabilizing but fundamentally unquantifiable risk.

By Jacob Goldstein

Warren Buffett -- the wise, grandfatherly investor -- has described derivatives as "financial weapons of mass destruction."

Warren Buffett -- the billionaire financier -- today had this to say about those weapons:

I use them to make money. If I think they're mispriced, I buy them.

Both sides of Buffett were on display today.

Buffett's company, Berkshire Hathaway is a major shareholder in Moody's, one of the big ratings agencies.

The agencies agencies are paid by businesses and governments to issue credit ratings, which are hugely influential in the bond market. The agencies put their highest ratings on lots of mortgage-backed bonds that got hammered in the housing bust.

Here's Buffett the financier on Moody's:

I've never been in Moody's. I don't know where they're located. I know their business model is extraordinary.

And here's Buffett the grandfatherly investor saying the same thing, by way of analogy:

We own a significant position in Procter & Gamble. ... I don't know how they make Tide.

Buffett suggested that Moody's wasn't really to blame for missing the magnitude of the housing bubble, because almost everybody missed it, including him. "I blew it," he said.

And he suggested that the high credit ratings now assigned to cities and states might be called into question in a few years.

"There will be a terrible problem," with state and local government debt, he said. "And then the question becomes, will the federal government help them?"

Bonus Buffett: Read our posts on Buffett's lobbying on derivatives, his stake in Goldman Sachs and the backstory behind his appearance today.

Oil is still spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. The feds are looking into criminal charges against BP. And it may take months before the well is capped.

What are the long-term implications for BP, and for the oil industry?

"It took more than thirty years to overcome the psychological and political damage done by [Three Mile Island], and there was no actual nuclear leakage," writes David Kotok of Cumberland Advisors, an investment management firm. "We estimate that Deepwater Horizon may end up larger in national impact than the nuclear event decades ago."

Of course, the world is far more dependent on oil than it ever was on nuclear power. Oil production, clearly, will continue to go on around the globe. But, Kotok writes:

Our expectation is that the oil business is about to enter a period of intense scrutiny and regulation worldwide. It will confront higher cost structures and much more inspection and regulation. This will eventually be reflected in higher oil prices.

BP itself is the biggest oil and gas producer in the U.S., and the biggest producer in the Gulf of Mexico, Bloomberg News says.

The company's stock is down by more than a third since the drilling rig leased by the company exploded on April 20. That low stock price has prompted some speculation that the company could be bought by another oil giant, such as Shell.

But, as the FT points out, antitrust regulators might balk at the merger of two of the biggest companies in the world. And BP's board would likely resist any attempt to "sell the company on the cheap," the FT says.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs spoke yesterday at a WSJ tech conference, and there were some interesting tidbits. The WSJ's Walt Mossberg asked Jobs about the development of the iPhone and the iPad:

"I actually started on the tablet first," Jobs says. "I had this idea of being able to get rid of the keyboard and type on a multitouch glass display."

But once Apple developed the display, and added touch-scrolling, "I thought, 'Oh my God, we can build a phone out of this,' " he says. "And I put the tablet project on the shelf, because the phone was more important."

Also in the video, Jobs predicts a "post-PC era," when PCs will be like trucks -- powerful machines used by the few, rather than the many. And he says he hopes tablets will help newspapers stay in business. "I don't want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers," he says.

After the jump: Remember Apple TV? In another video from the conference, Jobs discusses the difficult economics of bringing high-tech innovation to Television.

Back in the '80s, Kay Fishburn had a dream: Americans would band together and make voluntary donations to bring the national debt way down. She became something of a minor celebrity.

On today's Planet Money, we check in with Fishburn. And we talk to an economist, who explains why it would be a bad idea for Americans to raid their savings accounts to pay off the national debt.

It's all part of our ongoing quest to understand this whole gifts-to-pay-down-the-debt thing.

After the jump: reader mail, a spreadsheet and a Bob Edwards interview.

A few readers pointed out an interesting quirk in the data: there were 48 payments of $129.17 each. They came in every two weeks or so for about two years, starting in January, 2006.

We also got an email from Adam Eugene Osborne, of Waltham, Mass., who made a recent donation:

Probably the best $100.00 I spent in a long time. Makes me feel, like I did something to really help the country (even if it is such a minuscule amount compared to the real debt).

For more from Kay Fishburn, listen to the full audio of her 1990 interview with former Morning Edition host, Bob Edwards.

Download the podcast, or subscribe. Music: The Apples In Stereo's "Fashion." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Flickr.

The IMF is selling off some of its gold stash, and governments and central banks are buying.

The fund has been selling some of its gold on the open market this year as part of a plan to create an endowment. In all, the IMF plans to sell just over 400 tons of gold, or roughly one-eighth of its total holdings. That should bring in more than $8 billion in total, the WSJ says.

Meanwhile, central banks and governments have been stocking up. Worldwide, governments and central banks added 425 tons last year to their holdings, which now total more than 30,000 tons. That's the most since 1964 and the first expansion since 1988, Bloomberg says. And holdings are likely to grow again this year.

The price of gold, of course, has gone through the roof in the past couple years. People say it's a "store of value" -- that is, a place to put your money when you're nervous about inflation, which drives down the value of paper money.

A ton of gold, by the way, would be a cube that's about 1'3" on each side. That's why people who work with gold bricks have to wear special boots, to protect their feet from falling gold.

A year and a half after the financial system nearly collapsed, the boom in crisis lit is still going strong.

Three crisis-related books are on the bestseller list at the moment -- Crisis Economics, by Nouriel Roubini, an economist who predicted the crisis; 13 Bankers, by Simon Johnson and James Kwak, who write the blog Baseline Scenario; and The Big Short, by Michael Lewis, the narrative nonfiction writer who started his career with a memoir about his brief stint on Wall Street.

A bunch of other books bankers and economists have cycled through the list.

But of all of them, it's the Lewis book that seems to be winning the most hearts and minds on Capitol Hill.

The shout-outs seem mostly to have come from Dems, but Lewis has also been name checked by a few Republicans. The book isn't particularly prescriptive; for the most part, it's a character-driven narrative about a few outsider-types who predicted and profited from the housing bust.

But people like a good story. "It's very readable," one senator said.

"When senators are reading your book, it reaffirms your faith in society, on the one hand," Lewis told Politico, "and, on the other hand, it makes you nervous, because I don't think of myself as advising people who are actually going to change things."

This morning's NYT fronts a familiar housing-bust trend story: People who've chosen to stop paying their mortgages.

One striking figure in the story: As of April, it took 438 days, on average, for delinquent homeowners to be evicted. That's up from 251 days in January of 2008.

The graphic that accompanies the story shows the average time to eviction in each state; in New York and Florida, the average is over 500 days.

On a related note, check out our podcast from January on strategic defaults, where underwater borrowers actually want the bank to foreclose on their home as quickly as possible.

We want to know. So we put together this survey. If you could please take a few minutes to fill it out, it would be a big help.

Thanks very much.

We're making a t-shirt. So what? Everybody makes a t-shirt.

But here's the thing: We want to make a cool t-shirt. A shirt you'll wear for something other than going to the gym. And we need your help.

On today's podcast, we take a field trip to Barney's. (Do you have any idea what they charge for a t-shirt there?) Our guide is Claire Hamilton, a trend analyst at a company called WGSN.

And we talk to Ed Jay, a senior VP at American Express. He gathered data about 100,000 people who used their AmEx card to donate to public radio, and told us what other kind of stuff they bought. American Express sells this kind of information to businesses that want to know more about their customers.

(American Express doesn't track individual purchases, by the way. They aggregate information from large groups of people to draw broad conclusions about spending habits.)

So now we have some ideas. But we need to hear from you.

Send us your designs. Be creative. Use the whole shirt as a canvas. It doesn't have to say "Planet Money" in big letters. Remember: This is a shirt you'd wear to go somewhere other than the gym.

We'll pick some finalists and give everyone a chance to vote. The winner will get a t-shirt. And some other prize that we haven't figured out yet.

Download the podcast, or subscribe. Music: Lady Gaga's "Fashion." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Flickr. Take the Planet Money survey.