As The New York Times reports, this is far beyond what the government was expecting when it took over Bankia and “its portfolio of delinquent real estate loans.”

There are conflicting reports as to whether Spain has already agreed to hand over the bailout. The Wall Street Journal reports that the number “Bankia presented Friday have already been agreed with the government…” The Financial Times reports the same thing, but El País, Spain’s biggest paper, says at this moment it is a request, still pending approval from economy ministry and the Bank of Spain.

The New York Times reports:

“Bankia’s announcement came as Standard & Poor’s, the credit ratings agency, downgraded Bankia and two other banks, Banco Popular and Bankinter, to ‘junk’ status and lowered the ratings of two other Spanish banks also staggered by mounting bad loans. A junk rating could make it even harder for Bankia to borrow its way out of trouble.

“The rising fear now is that the recent steady trickle of deposits from Spain’s banks, which are suffering from the bursting of Spain’s real estate bubble, to institutions outside the country could eventually turn into the sort of bank run that almost brought the financial world to its knees after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.”

Providing background, The Guardian reports that Bankia was partly nationalized two-weeks ago, when the country provided a 4.5 billion euro injection of cash. But the estimates of how much more money the bank, which holds 10 percent of Spanish deposits, needed to survive have “been spiralling at an alarming rate.”

The big question here, the Times adds, is where this bailout will come from. Will Spain be able to afford it? Or will the European Union have to step in?

“Analysts increasingly see Spain’s banks needing a bailout from the European Stability Mechanism,” The Guardian reports. “French president François Hollande also believes that will be necessary, though the Spanish government continues to deny it.” [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Consumer confidence has improved “in each of the past nine monthly surveys” and is now at “its highest level since October 2007,” according to the latest Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan Survey of Consumers. The most recent recession officially began in December 2007, and lasted into early summer 2009.

Since consumers purchase about 70 percent of all the goods and services that businesses produce, they are a critical driving force for the economy. And, since many consumers also vote, how they feel could help determine which candidate gets their support.

But Richard Curtin, chief economist for the survey, notes in his analysis that “consumer confidence was nearly as high in the past two years before the gains were reversed. While gas prices and economic policy debates played a role in the pull backs, changes in job expectations also had a critical impact.” [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

1. Sticker price is the full price colleges list in their brochures and on their websites.

2. Net price is the price students actually pay. Net price accounts for the fact that many students receive grants or scholarships. So can be considerably lower than sticker price.

Quick example. Say you go to a school where the sticker price is $25,000 a year. You get a $10,000-a-year grant. The net price for you — the part you have to pay for through loans, work and a contribution from my family — is $15,000 a year.

Here’s the average sticker price and average net price for tuition and fees at public and private colleges in the U.S. over the past 15 years:

The sticker price has gone way up (no surprise). But, because the value of grants and scholarships has also grown, average net price has grown much more slowly. In fact, in the past five years, average net price at private colleges has actually fallen.

Of course, these are just averages, and there’s huge variation. To figure out what the net price would be for you at a given college, you can use a tool called the “net price calculator.”

As we noted recently, all colleges are now required to post a net price calculator on their website.

The calculator asks a series of questions about the student and the family’s financial situation. At the end, you get a page that shows the school’s sticker price, the scholarships and grants you’d be likely to qualify for, and the net price you’d be likely to pay.

The calculator provides only a rough estimate. But it can be a helpful way to focus less on sticker price and more on a price that’s closer to what you’d actually pay.

More From Planet Money:

The Real Price Of College

How Colleges Fight For Top Students

What America Owes In Student Loans

Note: The graphic is based on data in a College Board report called Trends in College Pricing (PDF), an excellent source for big-picture data on college prices. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Jackson spent his career cracking many color barriers, becoming the first African American network radio announcer, first black play-by-play sports announcer and first African American to host an interracial network television show, according to the Radio Hall of Fame, which inducted him in 1995.

His radio and civil rights career began at the same time when he defied a white radio station manager in 1939 and aired his interview program, The Bronze Review. A Yahoo review of his autobiography, “The House That Jack Built” explains Jackson bought radio time through white ad agencies and carefully chose his first guest: Franklin D. Roosevelt advisor and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune. He didn’t mention he’d host the program. After the first episode, the radio station was inundated by thrilled callers and the program stayed on the air.

Jackson later moved to New York where he co-founded Inner City Broadcasting, whose flagship station was WBLS-FM; this became the first ever black owned and operated radio station, notes Black Enterprise.

He was an on-air staple for decades, hosting a popular Sunday program, and recently appeared on the air, according to AP. He’s credited with helping African American musicians win airplay for their work during segregation.

Jackson founded the popular talent competition, Talented Teens International. WBLS adds over the course of his life, he received four Presidential commendations. Funeral details haven’t been announced. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

This is awkward, because you’re really not supposed to talk about this sort of thing out loud. You’re supposed to say, as Angela Merkel said again this week, “We want Greece to remain in the eurozone.”

But what if? What if you were a eurozone finance minister and your job right now was to protect your financial system in case of a Greek exit?

1. Add up how much money your country’s businesses have on the line in Greece.

Not just Greek government bonds, but also stock in Greek companies, loans to Greek businesses and IOUs from Greek importers. Some of these assets would immediately be re-denominated in drachma, which would result in losses.

2. Call your lawyers in London.

Under the recent debt deal, some Greek national debt is now subject to UK law. That means that even if Greece goes back to the drachma, this debt will still be due in euros — and you’ll need British lawyers to make sure that you get your money.

3. Get cozy with the European Central Bank.

You will want help from the European Central Bank, especially if you’re one of Europe’s troubled peripheral countries (Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy).

Here’s how you get the ECB on your side: Stand up and make a big speech saying how much you love the austerity program, how you’re on target to hit your austerity goals, and how safe your banks are. That should convince the ECB to turn on the faucet and shower your country with easy loans.

If all goes well, that should be enough to keep bank deposits in your country, enable your banks to keep lending money to your government, and keep your economy afloat — for now, anyway.

[Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Murky government rules, off-limits meatpacking floors, and a “gotcha” media mentality have created a fear and mistrust that’s left the public highly opinionated but often woefully misinformed about where our food comes from.

What is surprising is that the “pink slime” debacle has forced the meat industry to admit it needs to open up.

Enter Meatingplace, the meat processing industry’s trade magazine. This month’s striking cover is simply black with a neon pink all-caps headline: “SLIMED,” followed by the subhead: “what the hell happened.”

The article, co-authored by four of the magazine’s editors, shows how negative stories on Beef Products Inc.’s LFTB (and Cargill’s similar FTB) exploded “like spontaneous combustion” on social media this spring.What was odd, they say, is that there was no recall or big announcement to prompt the frenzy. The term “pink slime” was coined by a U.S. Department of Agriculture employee years ago, and it returned with a vengeance months after major beef buyers like McDonald’s announced they would stop using it.

Here’s what went wrong, according to Meatingplace:

1. Social media has made the bully pulpit much bigger. The distinctions between journalists and the “guy down the street” are blurred on the web, the magazine notes, allowing non-experts to spread half-truths quickly and easily. “It’s like putting a gun in the hands of a 6-year old,” says Lisa M. Keefe, Meatingplace editor and one of the article’s authors tells The Salt.

2. That gross name. Consumers thought “slime doesn’t sound like something I want to eat,” Barry Carpenter, CEO of the National Meat Association and a former depute administrator at USDA, tells Meatingplace.

3. We are visual animals. The pictures of pink slime popping up everywhere — some of which were not actually beef, according to the editors — made it hard for people to look away, Keefe says.

4. Government dithering. USDA’s response was “late and bipolar,” Meatingplace says. The agency affirmed the safety of LFTB “a full 10 days” after the first wave of web-based articles appeared in March. But later, the agency said schools could make their own decisions about whether to order it.

“The silence was deafening to consumers,” the article says. Supermarkets dropped the product and BPI eventually had to lay off thousands of people. Worth noting — the beef industry was already in trouble over soft beef demand, but “pink slime” seemed to have tipped the scales for some.

5. The perception of deception. Many of us have no idea where food comes from. And, in the wake of bank foreclosures, Bernie Madoff, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae scandals, “consumers are loaded for corporate bear and have the means to make their anger heard,” Meatingplace says.

“Add that to the meat industry’s long-standing aversion to inviting the public to witness the nitty-gritty process of making sausage … and consumers think the meat companies are hiding something,” the authors say.

(For the whole Meatingplace timeline on the “pink slime” story click here.)

So what’s next?

Improve consumer education and make “some of the industry’s more controversial operations, like slaughter,” more transparent, the article says.

In fact, within days of the social media explosion, BPI did just that. They went on YouTube to respond to concerns about using ammonia in its beef production and created the site pinkslimeisamyth.com (now beefisbeef.com) with safety endorsements from scientists. But even though science was on the company’s side, it didn’t seem to change public opinion much.

BPI execs did not respond to Meatingplace’s requests for interviews for their article.

The bottom line? The meat industry as a whole needs to change how it communicates before a crisis, Keefe says. “If you’re playing defense, forget it.”

Rational people can argue over whether we should be raising and processing livestock in a way that makes them more susceptible to pathogens like E. coli and requires the use of agents like ammonia to kill those bugs. But the fact is, we are, and we do.

We can also debate whether LFTB should have been labeled from the start, or whether it should be now.

So if a little more sunshine comes of this pink slime thing, that can’t be bad. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Business “game changer” Laura Sen is president and CEO of BJ’s Wholesale Club. She was among the small group of women on the Fortune 500 CEOs list last year, and Fortune magazine named her to its 2011 list of 50 Most Powerful Women in Business.

In an interview with Tell Me More host Michel Martin, Sen says she grew up with great support and high expectations. She and her siblings became top students and good athletes thanks to the push from their Irish-American “tiger mom.” Her father’s parents emigrated to the U.S. from China in the late 1800s.

During her time at Boston College, Sen studied French and did not have definite ideas about a future career. She eventually took up retail because she enjoyed shopping and was enthusiastic about working in a department store.

Sen describes retail as the perfect blend of art and science: On the science side, there’s data to help analysts understand trends in consumer behavior, finances and business; and on the art side, it’s all about design, products and staying relevant to people’s wants.

“I also love the fact that, you know, there’s about over 24,000 team members at BJ’s and leading a group of people that large is a humbling thing,” she says. “It’s a huge responsibility, and it’s a huge challenge.”

Sen has built relationships with people at every level within BJ’s. She visits colleagues at the stores, eats with them in the company cafeteria, and likes to ask how they’d improve BJ’s if they had a magic wand.

“I just feel like team members are less likely to be frank and candid if they think you’re some power figure up on a pedestal or whatever,” she says.

But Sen’s rise at BJ’s was not without obstacles. She joined the company in 1989, was fired by the candidate who beat her for the top job in 2003, returned in 2007, and was named president and CEO in 2009. Reflecting on that experience, Sen says “the world is round”: You will always run into the same people, companies or institutions throughout your career journey.

When Sen was asked to leave BJ’s, some people encouraged her to mount a legal challenge, but she had no stomach for it. “If I hadn’t done what I consider to be the high road, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” she says.

Sen also mentions philanthropy as part of the route to success. She says that her relatives liked to gamble, and when they won money, they gave some of it away to attract more good luck.

“And I have to say that in my experience in being very philanthropic, I’ve always found that I get way, way more – I get way more back than I ever give,” she says. “That’s a lesson that I’ve taught my children, and hopefully they will carry that on.”

Sen says the most important thing to understand in business and life is the power of communication: “The tool that we all have at our disposal and the tool that is most important to use in forging relationships and finding solutions and to move along in the career ladder is communication. And I think that it’s so important to think about what the other person is saying and listen hard, to think really hard about what you’re saying and how to present that point of view.” [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Some of the investors who bought shares of the company filed a lawsuit alleging that the two companies concealed information about Facebook’s expected performance.

This was one of the most eagerly anticipated IPOs in a long time, and Morgan Stanley fought hard to be named lead underwriter. But almost everything has gone wrong. The first day of stock sales was marred by technical glitches. The share price fell for two days in a row. And now the two companies are under investigation by government and industry regulators about the way the IPO was handled.

“From Morgan Stanley’s point of view this is a bad dream that is turning into a nightmare, because of the potential regulatory liability they may have triggered,” said Mercer Bullard, who heads the investor advocacy group Fund Democracy.

At issue is whether the companies passed on all the information they knew about revenue prospects in the weeks leading up to the IPO. Some analysts, including one from Morgan Stanley itself, had expressed concern about Facebook’s admission that its membership was growing faster than its ad revenues.

That suggests Facebook’s profits might not grow as fast as estimated, and it’s the kind of information anyone thinking of investing in the company would want to know. The allegation is that Morgan Stanley provided this information to its best clients, but not to all of them.

“For them to provide some information to one set of clients and a different set of information to others raises fundamental questions of fairness in the offering,” said James Angel, an associate professor of finance at Georgetown University.

Angel says this is likely to lead to a feeding frenzy of lawsuits by investors, and in fact that already appears to be starting.

On Wednesday, three investors filed suit against Morgan Stanley and Facebook. This is a class-action suit to potentially represent all the people who bought Facebook shares in recent days. Angel says the suit will hinge in part on the kind of information that was kept from investors.

“So the question is where these material changes that would have severely impacted other people’s buy and sell decisions had they known them, were they harmed as a result and did Morgan Stanley have a legal duty to disclose this?” Angel said.

Morgan Stanley declined to comment, but it did release a statement Tuesday saying it had followed the same procedures in this IPO that it does in all of the others it handles and had complied with all applicable regulations. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

According to the results of a new survey of more than 1,000 Americans, almost half of us think its harder to eat right than do our taxes. And genderwise, 55 percent of men say it’s harder to figure out what you should be eating than it is to figure out how to do your own taxes. For women, it’s slightly lower, at 48 percent. The survey comes from the folks at the International Food Information Council Foundation.

Given the confusion, it may not come as a surprise that more than half (55 percent) of Americans are trying to lose weight. But it seems lots of us are not sure how many much we should be eating. In fact, only one in seven Americans can correctly estimate the number of calories they need — a tricky business, we know.

And the other thing that’s making it really tough? Seventy-six percent of those surveyed agreed that it’s hard to know what to believe, in terms of nutrition advice, because the messages seem to change so often, as we’ve reported.

But, it’s clear from the survey results that lots of people are trying to puzzle it out. And here’s what the survey found about some of the top dieting strategies:

More than 70 percent of respondents says they’ve made efforts to cut back on fats, added sugars and salt, they’re trying to eat more whole grains, and they’re trying to cut calories by drinking water, and low -or zero- calorie beverages.

And, on fruit and vegetable consumption, the message to eat more is resonating. Eighty-seven percent say over the past year they’ve made an effort to eat more. The findings fit with another survey released this week by the Kellogg Foundation, found 68 percent of respondents say they eat more fresh produce than they did five years ago.

These points are just a few of the many morsels worth chewing on in the IFIC 2012 Food & Health Survey. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

HP said the cuts would happen over an extended period and should be done by the end of 2014.

“The restructuring is expected to generate annualized savings in the range of $3.0 to $3.5 billion exiting fiscal year 2014, of which the majority will be reinvested back into the company,” the company said in a statement.

The company said it would offer an early retirement program to limit the number of layoffs and the cuts will vary by country.

As we reported, the cuts were rumored last week.

The AP reports the cuts were precipitated as “the growing popularity of smartphones, the iPad and other mobile devices makes it tougher for the company to sell personal computers.” [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]