Random Links of Finance and Music to kill your Friday

- James Kwak on bankslaughter. Knocked out of the park.

- USA Today on overdraft charges, rightfully calling them predatory payday loans executed by banks. CJR adds more. This is important both in and of itself, but also as an example of where current financial innovation and profitability comes from.

- New Yorker profile on Sheila Bair, chair of the FDIC.

- Mark Greif on Fugazi.

- X-Shaped Recovery: “This is related to Mohamed El-Erian’s “new normal” idea — while previous recessions were part of economic cycles within a certain economy, what we’re going through right now is a painful disruption from that economy to something else.”

- Sunny Day Real Estate Reunites! Didn’t they already do the reunion tour in 1999? The lyrics “And I dream / To heal your wounds / But I bleed myself / I bleed myself” always won every impromptu “most emo lyrics” contest I’ve thrown.

- Ed: “Alberto Gonzales is finally off the dole. He’ll recruit minority students to Texas Tech University and teach one political science course per semester. Fine, I’ll go with the obvious joke: Is writing “I don’t know” or “I don’t recall” 78 times in two hours an acceptable answer on his final exam?” Ha!

- Stephin Merritt and Claudia Gonson of The Magnetic Fields cover Katy Perry’s “Waking Up in Vegas.” It makes me like the original.

The way Merritt can make it sound like a Magnetic Fields song (“why am I wearing your class ring?”) makes me wonder if everything he says sounds like a Magnetic Fields song, like when he orders a burrito or calls to complain that the cable has gone out.