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Sometime in the past year, St. Louis slipped into an uncomfortable, but familiar  pattern. When the rest of the country is creating jobs, we lag behind.

So it has been for decades. We seem to miss out on the hot sectors and we were saddled, until recently, with a shrinking manufacturing base. We don’t seem to have the workforce that makes employers want to expand here.

There used to be a mythology that the St. Louis economy did OK during recessions, even if it lagged during expansions. That’s no longer true, if it ever was.

During the Great Recession and for a while afterward, the metro area’s employment reports tracked national trends closely. We suffered the same devastating job losses, percentage wise, as the rest of the country in 2008 and 2009, and we experienced the same halting recovery in 2010.

Then, early last year, the lines diverged. The nation continued to add jobs, slowly but steadily, and St. Louis didn’t. For all of 2011, the metro area lost 3,900 jobs, a shrinkage of 0.3 percent.

The U.S. economy added 1.8 million jobs last year, for growth of 1.4 percent. The St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, commenting on the trend in a recent report, said the metro area’s job growth has been “systematically below the nation’s” since the first quarter of 2011.

David Rapach, associate professor of economics at St. Louis University, predicts that area employment will grow just 1.0 percent this year, compared with a national forecast of 1.7 percent.

St. Louis knows this territory well us fast cash.

“It’s just our usual thing of being behind,” says Howard Wall, chairman of the economics department at Lindenwood University. “The industries that are doing well, we don’t have.”

Of late, that’s the oil and gas industry. Until someone discovers shale gas under the Gateway Arch, we won’t keep pace with states like Texas, North Dakota and Pennsylvania.

We shouldn’t, however, just throw up our hands and complain that geology is destiny.

Some of the big industries we do have aren’t doing especially well. The health and education sector shrank slightly in St. Louis last year even as it grew 2 percent nationally.

Manufacturing, on the other hand, grew at about the national average. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the loss of factory jobs was a major reason why St. Louis lagged the nation. If that’s no longer an issue, why are we slipping into the old pattern?

“Our long-term problem,” Wall continues, “is human capital. We have not enough workers who are highly educated and too many of the poorly educated.”

Political leaders, however, don’t get it. Instead of figuring out how to improve Missouri’s education system, elected officials debate tax-credit programs that shift money to favored industries.

They’re fighting over pieces of the pie rather than making the pie bigger.

By just keeping pace with the nation, St. Louis could have had 22,000 more jobs than it actually did at the end of 2011. If Rapach’s forecast is correct, that jobs gap will grow by an additional 9,000 in 2012.

Those aren’t huge numbers, but they make a big difference over time. If the worst recession in 70 years wasn’t enough, what will it take to force a major rethinking of the region’s economic policies?

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Bank of America has launched a pilot program that will allow some homeowners at risk of foreclosure to become renters and stay in their homes.

Fewer than 1,000 borrowers in Arizona, Nevada and New York will be enrolled in the test program, which began this week. Those selected will transfer the title of their homes back to Bank of America and have their mortgage debt forgiven.

The homeowners can rent the homes for up to three years at or below their area’s market rental rate payday loan.

Bank of America says it’s targeting homeowners who are at “considerable risk” of foreclosure; have high loan balances relative to their home’s value; have exhausted all loan modification programs; and have been delinquent on their mortgage payments for more than 60 days.

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Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne gave to the rich by lowering Britain

Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne sought to calm speculation over whether he will scrap Britain

Singapore intensified efforts to address the island

Companies slowed their hiring in January, according to a report by payroll processor ADP.

The private sector added 170,000 jobs in the month, ADP said Wednesday, missing forecasts of 200,000 jobs that economists polled by Briefing.com had predicted.

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Obama battles job crisis

Before Obama even took office, America had lost 4.4 million jobs. Track his progress since then.

The previous month was also weaker than originally reported. December’s strong number — first reported as 325,000 jobs — was revised down to 292,000.

In January, small businesses — those with fewer than 50 employees — made up more than half of the job gains, hiring 95,000 people.

"Those jobs were mostly in the services sector and match some optimism we have seen in small business lending," Diane Swonk, chief economist for Mesirow Financial, said in a note.

A Federal Reserve survey released earlier this week showed demand for small business loans picked up in the fourth quarter — a trend that could reflect growing optimism about the economy.

Meanwhile, the report showed large companies with 500 or more employees hired only 3,000 new workers, and medium-sized businesses added 72,000 to their payrolls.

ADP typically sets the tone for the government’s highly anticipated monthly jobs report, due Friday, but its figures aren’t always a good predictor of the government’s numbers.

Economists surveyed by CNNMoney expect the Labor Department’s data to show 130,000 jobs were added last month, including 150,000 from the private sector and a loss of government jobs.

That would mark a steep slowdown in hiring from December, when 200,000 jobs were created.

The unemployment rate is expected to rise to 8.6%. 

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France plans to unilaterally impose a 0.1 percent tax on financial transactions starting in August, President Nicolas Sarkozy said, brushing aside opposition from the nation

A four-year economic crisis has left societies battered and widened the gap between the haves and have-nots, financial leaders conceded Wednesday _ with one suggesting that Western capitalism itself may be endangered.

With the global economic outlook gloomy at best as Europe struggles with its debt crisis, there’s a sense at the heavily guarded World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alps that free markets are on trial.

There’s a widespread acceptance that more must be done to convince critics that Western capitalism has a future and that it can learn the lessons of its massive failures.

For David Rubenstein, the co-founder and managing director of asset management firm Carlyle Group, leaders must work fast to overcome the current crisis or else different models of capitalism, such as the form practiced in China, may win the day.

“As a result of this recession, that’s lasted longer than anyone predicted and will probably go on for a number more years … we’re gonna have a lot of economic disparities,” said Rubenstein.

“We’ve got to work through these problems, if we don’t do in 3 or 4 years … the game will be over for the type of capitalism that many of us have lived through and thought was the best type,” he added.

His stark appraisal may have been an outlier, but there was a clear defensive posture among many participants on this opening day of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

There were numerous references to the need to innovate, the need to consult with employees and the realization that power in the world is shifting from the west to the east. While the traditional industrial economies of the United States and Europe have limped through the last few years, often from one crisis to another, many economies in Asia and Latin America have been booming.

As Ben Verwaayen, the chief executive of Alcatel-Lucent, said, there’s a “very different view” of capitalism in Brazil.

“This is a very different discussion depending where you are,” Verwaayen said.

Many rejected the suggestion from Sharan Burrow, the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, that capitalism has lost its “moral compass” and needed to be “reset.” Still, representatives of the business community insisted they were learning from the mistakes that dragged the world into its deepest economic recession since the World War II.

Bank of America’s CEO Brian Moynihan said the excesses of banks in the run-up to the banking crisis of 2008 reflected the economies they were operating in, so it was important that policymakers don’t overreact.

Moynihan, whose bank was forced to back down on plans to start charging a $5 debit card fee after protests by the Occupy movement and others, said banks have “done a lot” to reduce excesses. He also noted that boom and bust cycles are a part of the Western capitalist structure.

Many outside the confines of the Davos conference center disagree, after years of crisis in which hundreds of millions of people have lost their jobs even as top executives have continued to reap huge pay packets.

Davos activists on Wednesday sent aloft big red weather balloons carrying a huge protest banner reading “Hey WEF, Where are the other 6.9999 billion leaders?”

The activists were from the Occupy WEF movement, a small group camping out in igloos here and following in the footsteps of the Occupy Wall Street movement that spread to cities around the world.

Davos is a hard-to-reach place to protest, tucked in the Swiss Alps. Some 2,600 of the world’s most influential people are gathered for the forum this week, amid increasing worries about the global economy and social unrest due to rising income inequalities.

The CEO of accounting giant Deloitte, Joe Echevarria, talked about developing “compassionate capitalism.”

“You’re going to have to deal with regulation _ balancing the need to protect society along with stifling growth,” he told The Associated Press in an interview. “I think that has to manifest itself through the choices that governments and businesses make.”

While the bigwigs debated at Davos, key Greek bondholders were holding closed-door meetings in Paris to discuss how _ and whether _ to continue talks central to resolving Europe’s debt crisis that would forgive 50 percent of Greece’s enormous debt.

Mark Penn, global CEO of the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller, told AP “the whole crisis has raised larger questions about how is capitalism working, how do you redefine fairness in the 21st century?”

Later Wednesday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel may chart her course for Europe’s crisis in her keynote speech at the Davos forum.

In an interview with six European newspapers published Wednesday, Merkel drove home the need for reform in debt-troubled eurozone nations instead of spending more to beef up the region’s bailout fund.

Surveys ahead of the meeting showed pessimism among world CEOs and plunging levels of public trust in business and government leaders and concerns that fragility in the U.S. and European economies will bring the whole world’s economy down.

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Treasuries (YCGT0025) had the biggest annual return since the depths of the financial crisis in 2008 as Europe

Jon Corzine is expected Tuesday to once again distance himself from an estimated $1.2 billion in customer money that vanished when MF Global collapsed this fall.

This time, Corzine will have company.

Bradley Abelow, MF Global’s president and chief operating officer, and Henri Steenkamp, the chief financial officer, are also scheduled to testify to the Senate Agriculture Committee.

All three say they don’t know where the money is, according to prepared remarks and Corzine’s previous testimony to a House panel last week. Nor do they take responsibility for authorizing the movement of money out of customer accoun.

Depending on the circumstances, transferring money from customers’ accounts could violate securities laws and, in some cases, could amount to a crime. Federal authorities have begun criminal investigations. And regulators are looking into whether the firm broke securities rules.

MF Global collapsed into the eighth-largest bankruptcy in U.S. history on Oct. 31 after a disastrous bet on European debt. Corzine stepped down as CEO on Nov. 4.

Corzine told the House Agriculture Committee last week that he didn’t know what happened to the money. He said he didn’t become aware of the shortfall until Oct. 30, one day before the firm filed for bankruptcy protection.

In his prepared testimony, Steenkamp says he had no direct involvement in the transfer of funds.

“Direct involvement with operational matters such as bank accounts or fund transfers has never been part of my duties,” Steenkamp says.

Abelow says he cannot explain what happened to the money without having access to MF Global documents, which a trustee now controls.

“At this time … I do not know the answers to those questions,” he says in his prepared testimony.

Anthony Sabino, a law professor at St. John’s University in New York, said Steenkamp and Abelow “are in a riskier position” than Corzine because they were responsible for day-to-day operations of MF Global.

Tuesday’s hearing will include an added element of drama because Corzine, a former Democratic senator from New Jersey, will be pressed by some senators he served with from 2000 through 2005 payday loans.

The Senate panel is one of three congressional committees to have issued subpoenas to compel Corzine’s testimony on the issue. It marked the first time a former senator has been subpoenaed by his former peers in more than 100 years, according to the Senate historian’s office.

Many lawmakers have heard from farmers, ranchers and small business owners in their states who are missing money that was deposited with the firm. Agricultural businesses use brokerage firms like MF Global to help reduce their risks in an industry vulnerable to swings in oil, corn and other commodity prices.

Corzine, who also was New Jersey governor from 2006 until early 2010, told lawmakers last week that he never intended to authorize the transfer of funds from customer accounts. If any subordinates moved clients’ money in the belief that Corzine had authorized it, “it was a misunderstanding,” he said.

Along with Corzine, Steenkamp and Abelow have been sued in class-action complaints on behalf of MF Global shareholders. The lawsuits accuse the executives of making false and misleading statements about MF Global’s financial strength and cash balances.

MF Global didn’t list the European debt on its balance sheet for all to see. Instead, those holdings were shifted to the company’s “off-balance sheet,” deep in its financial statements. Some separate filings with regulators excluded the European debt entirely.

A lawyer for the trustee overseeing the liquidation of MF Global’s brokerage operations said in court Friday that the trustee’s staff has discovered some “suspicious” trades in MF Global customer accounts that were made in the last days before the firm failed. The lawyer didn’t provide details.

Corzine said last week that customers’ losses weigh heavily on him.

“I think about this every day,” he said. “I could not be more regretful, more distressed that we are ruining people’s lives.”

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