When it comes to allocating scarce public resources, large corporations seem to have the upper hand in the US. We already know that many powerful companies, particularly the Wall Street investment banks, having gotten plenty of Washington cash. Now it looks like they're getting first dibs on the scarce H1N1 vaccine as well.

If I remember correctly, last fall the problems with the financial sector nearly cratered the global economy -- what with the $30 trillion in lost stock market value and over a trillion dollars in bank write-offs. As I've written before, Wall Street accounts for 0.057 percent of our population, but because it has given $5 billion to Washington politicians and lobbyists over the last decade, the government poured trillions of dollars into bailing it out after its little collapse last year.

I recently delivered a Webinar, Economic Outlook: U.S. and Key Industries, and got asked a very interesting question -- How will we know the recession is over? With Thursday's report that productivity grew 9.5 percent while the number of people added to the unemployment rolls hit 512,000 in the last week, the signals are not exactly clear.

But my answer to the question is that people can follow eight indicators to know whether we're out of a recession. My best guess is that these indicators will not all flash a green light suddenly or at the same time. But if you follow these indicators over the next few months and monitor changes in them closely, you may get some meaningful signs of whether the recession is over.

Before jumping into these indicators, there is one more thing. As I've posted, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) officially decides when recessions begin and end and they dated the current one from December 2007 -- the month that jobs started shrinking. So that is one of the indicators that I am tracking. But without further ado, here are the eight:

Wall Street has a short memory when it comes to pay. That's what came to mind when I saw a report saying that many big leveraged buyouts (LBOs) are in trouble -- four of the 10 biggest companies bought in leveraged buyouts have stopped paying back the money they borrowed. Nevertheless, Wall Street will pay itself record bonuses in 2009.

Unless my memory is failing me, it was only 14 months ago that Wall Street nearly went bankrupt. Without trillions of dollars in taxpayer money, it's highly unlikely that it would be in a position to pay itself $140 billion in bonuses this year.

Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt spoke at MIT this afternoon. He had some interesting things to say about the company's place in the world -- and how Google can continue to follow its golden rule, "Don't be evil."

Schmidt came to MIT to honor the memory of one of my MIT professors, Dr. Michael Hammer, who, as I wrote earlier, tragically passed away about 14 months ago. Hammer was most famous for co-authoring Reengineering the Corporation, along with my former boss, James A. Champy. But Hammer received tenure as a computer science professor at MIT before he became a management guru.

Goldman Sachs Group (GS) makes executives wealthy when it handles their companies' initial public offerings or when it advises them on mergers and acquisitions. Then it often signs them up to manage that wealth. So the folks at Goldman have plenty of strategies for maximizing these clients' wealth. Yesterday I had lunch with a Goldman partner who explained six ideas for such well-to-do families. But you don't have to be rich to glean some useful insights from these ideas. In fact, the average investor can approximate three of them.

Before getting into the details of these investment ideas, I thought it was interesting that the partner spent time discussing the differences in how Goldman manages some internal operations and how it accounts for its balance sheet in comparison to some of its competitors.

Investors are applauding a deal announced Monday afternoon between two makers of tools. Stanley Works (SWK) will acquire Black & Decker (BDK) in an all stock deal according to DealBook. While the agreement called for Black & Decker to be acquired for $4.5 billion in Stanley stock at the time the market closed Monday, the price of the deal is rising because Wall Street loves it so much.

How so? The deal is a stock swap which means that Stanley will exchange 1.275 shares of its stock for each share of Black & Decker. That was a 22 percent premium over Friday's market close. Since the deal was announced, however, the stock of Black & Decker surged over 20 percent, to $57.10. And in a really unusual happening, even Stanley's shares rose 4 percent, to $47. That gain means that Black & Decker shares are worth even more, according to DealBook.

I would like to congratulate the Obama administration for drawing the right line in the sand. Unlike the Bush administration, Obama did not permit a $639 billion bankruptcy -- Lehman Brothers -- whose collapse nearly caused social chaos as people lost confidence in their money market funds. With today's CIT Group (CIT) bankruptcy filing, the U.S. will lose $2.3 billion in TARP money, but with $71 billion in assets, CIT will keep operating and global panic will not follow.

As I posted previously, CIT Group makes loans to about a million small businesses like Dunkin' Brands franchises. Those businesses need capital to operate and they can't get it very easily by accessing public debt and equity markets. So lenders like CIT Group really matter to them. But the company got distracted by subprime mortgages and student loans and it is likely to scale back to its core business of lending to small and medium sized business.

I like what the Securities & Exchange Commission is doing this days. It cracked down on insider trading at Galleon Holdings, the former $3.7 billion hedge fund whose boss, Raj Rajaratnam, is out on $100 million bail. But the SEC hasn't stopped there: Yesterday it announced an indictment against a former chief financial officer of ValueAct Capital.

You may recall that several years ago, ValueAct Capital cleverly bought a huge chunk of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSO) after Stewart was tossed in jail in 2004 for lying to investigators about her late 2001 sale of stock in biotech company ImClone Systems -- prosecutors suspected she sold based on insider information. ValueAct ended up owning 22 percent of MSO and sold most of its stake in 2005 after the stock rebounded, picking up a nice profit in the process.

Some cancers are particularly nasty because they spread so quickly through the body. The same can be said for the way insider trading can spread its black wings throughout the financial system. This comes to mind as one contemplates the latest revelations about Galleon Group, the formerly $3.7 billion hedge fund whose founder, Raj Rajaratnam, has been charged in the largest hedge fund insider-trading case ever. Rajaratnam is out on $100 million bail.

The latest news about Galleon does not expose all the new cancer sites -- but it adds some color to what we already knew. Specifically, it reveals how the SEC failed to investigate Galleon in 2001 after a Galleon associate was convicted of wire fraud, even though a concerned JPMorgan Chase (JPM) analyst reported to the SEC that year that something was fishy at Galleon. And "color" is a key word, because it appears that Galleon and its hangers-on used it as code for insidery information, the use of which to trade may have been in violation of insider-trading laws.

During the last recession in 2001, there were 22 months between the time that GDP started growing and the time that job growth resumed, according to The Boston Globe. Of course, this current recession has been far worse, so it could be three years before we start to see job creation.

This comes to mind in analyzing today's report that GDP grew 3.5 percent in the third quarter. It certainly helped that durable goods spending spiked 22.3 percent, as the Associated Press reported, with help from the $4,500 cash-for-clunkers rebate program -- and that housing constructing spending soared even higher, up 23 percent, thanks to an $8,000 first-time home purchase tax credit, according to Bloomberg.