Here’s the how the AP rounds up the latest:

“Investors had breathed a sigh of relief Thursday after Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos and the heads of the three parties backing his government agreed to private sector wage cuts, civil service layoffs and cuts in government spending.

“But finance ministers from the other 16 countries that use the euro insisted that Greece save an extra euro325 million ($430 million), pass the cuts through parliament and guarantee that they will be enforced after planned elections in April.

At stake is whether Greece will receive another round of international bailout money. If it doesn’t, analysts expect the country will default on its debt and that could send shockwaves across the world.

As the Financial Times puts it, the extra 325 million euros, put off George Karatzaferis, “head of the LAOS party — a far-right minority member of the unity government.” Three of the party’s cabinet members offered their resignation and according to The Guardian, which is live-blogging the situation, deputy foreign minister Mariliza Xenogiannakopoulou has also resigned.

The threat of austerity measures also led the countries two biggest trade unions to call for a 48-hour strike, which shutdown government offices, schools, and publish transport among other things today.

The FT sets the scene in Athens:

“A battery of loudspeakers outside the finance ministry urged: ‘Rebel now, keep striking, don’t give in,’ as protesters streamed into central Syntagma square.

“‘We don’t have much more to lose,’ said Stavros, a 28-year-old architect as he sprayed graffiti on a shuttered department store. ‘Six years studying, another doing military service and no chance of a job…What can you expect?’”

The Guardian reports that all this turmoil will ultimately come to a head on Sunday, when the Greek parliament votes on whether to accept the austerity measures.

Meanwhile, partially on the Greek news, the Dow is down 1 percent, with the Nasdaq and S&P in similarly negative territory. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Of particular concern to many, as Greg found, is that with “750,000 potential claimants,” the money in the settlement that’s been set aside to compensate “robo-signing victims who have lost their homes,” comes to about $2,000 per owner.

On Tell Me More today, host Michel Martin asked Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan why that isn’t just “window-dressing.”

Donovan said that for many who suffered from the burst of the housing bubble, “the harm was a few thousand dollars.” Some “had fees they were charged that they shouldn’t have been.” For others, “their paperwork was lost and it delayed them from getting help.”

But if a homeowner suffered more damage — “$50,000 or $100,000″ or the loss of a home — there are other remedies, Donovan said. After documenting the harm, such homeowners can “at the cost of the banks” if those institutions were at fault, “get full compensation.” And, Donovan added, nothing about the $25 billion agreement “stops you from going into court.”

There’s more information about such remedies at the National Mortgage Settlement website.

Much more from Michel’s conversation with Donovan was broadcast on Tell Me More. Click here to find an NPR station that airs or streams the show. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

“You’re technically writing your own funeral, down to the color of the flowers” says Dolores Atallo.

Atallo runs the living wills team at the consulting firm Deloitte. She shows up to our interview wearing all black, and jokes that she moonlights as an undertaker.

“The regulators are your funeral directors,” she says. “They tell you how you’re going to be unwound and then they stand over there and say, ‘I’m very sorry for your loss.’ “

Each bank is now responsible for proving — in detail — that in a crisis situation it could fail without bringing down the financial system. In the case of giant banks, this is ridiculously complicated.

“It’s like looking at a bowl of spaghetti and saying, ‘Do you know how many strings of pasta are in this bowl?’ ” Atallo says. “And that’s a question the banks need to be able to answer.”

That’s just the bank side. Now imagine you are the relatively small government agency that will have to actually execute that living will. Sell the bank’s assets. Close it down. Insure the depositors.

I watched one living wills meeting at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation where more than 20 people spent at least 15 minutes just discussing this one question: If the government took over a huge bank to wind down operations, who would be in charge?

It is reasonable to assume that these living will documents will never actually be used. When it comes down to the wire, the government will bail out the big banks. The government will once again make an exception.

Even if that’s true though, Dolores Atallo says planning for death is an incredibly useful exercise. You learn things. You find things in the basement that have no business being there.

“There are legal entities that exist for no reason at financial institutions because they existed for a purpose that people forgot about and its on the books,” she says.

At the very least, planning for the end is an interesting thought experiment. An enormous institution can take a good look at itself and ask: Do things really need to be this way? Thinking about death sometimes changes the way you decide to live. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

“We were adversaries. Some might say, bitter adversaries,” says Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States.

Pacelle’s organization says it wants to end factory farming. So Gene Gregory, president of the United Egg Producers, which represents most of the country’s biggest egg farmers, used to think that there was no point even talking to Pacelle. “Why would you want to have a conversation with someone who wants to eliminate your business?” he says.

These days, though, they’re not just having a conversation; They’re allies, walking shoulder to shoulder into offices on Capitol Hill, asking Congress to approve new rules for egg farmers.

They spent much of this past Tuesday in these lobbying meetings. But they arrived there from very different places — starting with breakfast.

Pacelle, the Humane Society president, woke up in a trendy part of the nation’s capital and started the day with a berry smoothie with soy milk. No ham, no eggs, as always.

“I made a decision a long time ago that I was not going to consume animal products, because I was concerned about what was going on on factory farms,” he says.

Gregory, meanwhile, lives in Georgia, in the suburbs outside Atlanta. He got up really early on Tuesday so he could catch his flight to Washington. So breakfast was a rush.

“My wife keeps hard-boiled eggs in the refrigerator. So I had a hard-boiled egg and a glass of juice before I left the house,” he says.

Of course he’d eat an egg. Gregory has been connected to the egg industry for about 50 years, either running a farm himself or representing other farmers.

Pacelle has been among that industry’s fiercest critics. He took aim, specifically, at the industry’s standard practice of crowding chickens into long lines of wire cages, with hundreds of thousands of birds in a single chicken house.

“I said that these factory farms were cruel and inhumane, no question about that,” he says. “We’re passionate about this issue. We want to see changes within this industry.”

Over the past decade, these two men spent millions of their organizations’ dollars fighting over proposals to ban the cages. In a series of states, notably California, the egg producers lost badly.

Then, last summer, they did something unexpected.

Gregory sent a message to Pacelle through an intermediary: “Can the two of us just talk?” And Pacelle saw an opportunity.

“We could fight the United Egg Producers for another 10 or 15 years, and spend millions of dollars on both sides. But the other option is, we could sit down together and figure out a pathway that’s good for industry, and better for animals,” he says.

Within a few months, the two sides came up with a compromise. They agreed to jointly lobby Congress for a law that would allow farmers to keep their chickens in cages, but the chickens would get twice as much space, plus perches and “nest boxes” where they could lay their eggs. (Last month, I visited a chicken house in California that already has these cages.)

Pacelle and Gregory agreed the new cages and nest boxes all would be phased in over fifteen years. That’s to avoid chaos in the industry and “ensure that we always have a sufficient supply of eggs, at a fair price,” says Gregory.

For both Gregory and Pacelle, there’s a calculation behind this joint venture.For the egg producers, it’s a lot better than the growing patchwork of state regulations that they were already facing. For the Humane Society, it’s a way to change conditions on farms in a lot of states that weren’t likely to regulate the egg industry at all.

But at this point, there also seems to be a bit more involved than those calculations. It may not be a close personal friendship. But despite all that divides them — different generations, backgrounds, and dietary preferences — there seems to be genuine respect.

“I’ve found him to be a man of his word,” Gregory says, speaking about the Humane Society president. “It doesn’t have to be his way or no way. And he’s not trying to eliminate our business, or anybody’s in animal agriculture. He just wants to see improvements made.”

Pacelle, for his part, says that Gregory has helped him understand the pressures involved in trying to make a living by producing food — “the daily struggles that a lot of farmers go through, economically. They were kind of in a race with others, in a competitive environment, to build efficiencies, and this is how it went.”

The former adversaries will need each other to get their proposal approved. It’s an unusual plan — as unconventional as the partnership that hatched it. No one knows whether Congress will find that appealing, or perhaps suspicious. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Overview

The Occupy Wall Street encampments have all but disappeared, but the issues raised by the movement’s rallying cry against inequality continue to have an impact on political discourse. Each of the 2012 presidential hopefuls have put forth his own plan to address the financial woes that continue to plague millions of Americans — but in very different ways.

President Obama has called on the wealthiest Americans to “pay their fair share of taxes” through the Buffett Rule, named after billionaire investor Warren Buffett, which would raise taxes for those making more than $1 million a year. Conversely, GOP contenders think that top earners should pay lower taxes so that they are free to invest in businesses that might then create jobs.

All of the Republican candidates have promised to extend the George W. Bush-era tax cuts on top earners, but some are proposing far more extreme changes to tax policy. Newt Gingrich has proposed an alternative flat tax rate of 15 percent that any taxpayer can opt for in order to cut back on the costs associated with filing taxes. Ron Paul has taken this notion even further by calling for the Internal Revenue Service to be shut down.

President Obama

Individual Taxes

End the Bush-era tax cuts for households that make more than $250,000 a year.

Implement the “Buffett Rule” which would ensure that taxpayers who make over $1 million a year pay a minimum effective tax rate of 30 percent.

Corporate Taxes

Lower the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to somewhere in the high 20 percent range.

Prevent U.S. companies from using overseas shelters for profits on intangible property such as royalties.

Provide a 20 percent tax break to companies that move operations back to the U.S.

Tighten regulations around “deferrals” of income earned abroad and impose a minimum tax on overseas profits.

Dividends And Corporate Gains

Require foreign tax credits from dividends paid to a parent company to be pooled.

Force private equity managers to pay the 35 percent standard tax rate instead of the 15 percent capital-gains tax rate on annual earnings from “carried interest.”

Impact

Tax revenue is projected to go up by about $1.6 trillion over 10 years, which includes $866 billion from the expiration of the George W. Bush-era tax cuts.

Source: CNBC; Reuters; barackobama.com

Newt Gingrich

Individual Taxes

Extend all 2001-2011 tax cuts that would otherwise expire in 2013.

Offer optional alternative tax system, which would create a 15 percent flat tax rate and allow taxpayers to claim a standard $12,000 exemption for each individual and dependent.

Unclear if taxpayers can switch back-and-forth between the “flat tax” option and the current tax.

Repeal the federal estate tax.

Corporate Taxes

Cut the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 12.5 percent.

Allow capital expenditures to be fully expensed.

Businesses would not be able to deduct the cost of employee benefits and interest payments.

Dividends And Capital Gains

Capital gains, dividends and interest income would not be taxable under the flat tax system.

Impact

Gingrich’s plan would reduce tax revenues by about $850 billion in 2015 compared with current law, a roughly 35 percent cut in projected revenue.

Source: Tax Policy Center; newt.org

Ron Paul

Individual Taxes

Extend all Bush-era tax cuts.

Eliminate the income tax without creating a replacement.

Eliminate all deductions and credits.

End taxes on personal savings.

Corporate Taxes

Cut the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent.

Allow U.S. companies to repatriate overseas profits without incurring additional taxes.

Dividends And Capital Gains

Exempt capital gains and dividends from taxes.

Impact:

Plans to cut spending by $1 trillion during his first year in office.

Would abolish several government agencies including the Internal Revenue Service.

Source: Tax Policy Center; Wall Street Journal; ronpaul.com; ronpaul2012.com

Mitt Romney

Individual Taxes

Permanently extend the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts that would otherwise expire in 2013.

Allow some provisions set by the 2009 stimulus act to expire, including the earned income tax credit.

Repeal the federal estate tax.

Corporate Taxes

Cut the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent.

Extend for one year the full expensing of capital expenditures.

Make the current research and experimentation credit permanent.

Allow a “tax holiday” for the repatriation of corporate profits from abroad.

Dividends And Capital Gains

Repeal the 3.8 percent tax on investment income of high-income individual taxpayers as well as the 0.9 percent tax on wages, both of which are scheduled to take effect in 2013 under the Affordable Care Act of 2010.

Impact

Three-fourths of taxpayers would see tax cuts of an average of more than $4,700 compared with current law.

Federal tax revenues would fall by an estimated $600 billion in 2015, a cut of about 16 percent.

Source: Tax Policy Center; mittromney.org

Rick Santorum

Individual Taxes

Permanently extend the 2001 and 2003 Bush-era tax cuts that would otherwise expire in 2013.

Collapse the current six tax brackets to two with 10 percent and 28 percent rates.

Triple the tax exemption for dependent children.

Repeal the federal estate tax.

Corporate Taxes

Repeal the 3.8 percent tax on investment income of high-income individual taxpayers as well as the 0.9 percent tax on wages, both of which are scheduled to take effect in 2013 under the Affordable Care Act of 2010.

Dividends And Capital Gains

Lower the tax on capital gains and dividends to 12 percent.

Impact

Taxes on average would be cut more than $9,700 for about 81 percent of taxpayers, while fewer than 0.5 percent would see their taxes increase an average of $175 compared with current law.

Tax revenues would fall by about $900 billion in 2015 compared with current law, a 40 percent cut.

Source: Tax Policy Center; ricksantorum.com [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

The petition, which asks the country to make “ethical” products, included about 250,000 signatures. Organizers said they were delivering them to Apple stores in Bangalore, London, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Sydney and New York City.

NPR’s Margot Adler was at the Apple store at Grand Central Terminal in New York. She reports that Shelby Knox, the director for Change.org, the website used to collect the signatures, delivered the petitions to the store manager.

“We’re coming together as fans of Apple, who buy their products, to say, we want an ethical product,” Knox told Margot. “You are a leader in technology and we want you to be a leader in making ethical products for us to use.”

Margot asked Knox if she would switch to another brand, but Knox said there wasn’t an ethical choice.

The protests come after various reports have documented poor working conditions at Foxconn’s factories in China. Foxconn manufactures electronics for big brands like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Nintendo. In January, The New York Times ran a long piece that documented the working conditions at the factories and before that Wired reported on them.

According to Wired some Foxconn employees work 12-hour days without a break. At times, they’re not allowed to talk or sitdown.

Apple sent ABC News a statement in which the company said it insists “our suppliers provide safe working conditions, treat workers with dignity and respect, and use environmentally responsible manufacturing processes wherever Apple products are made.”

Apple said every year it was increasing the number of inspections it undertook.

“Last month Apple became the first technology company admitted to the Fair Labor Association, a leading nonprofit organization dedicated to improving conditions for workers around the world,” Apple said. “The FLA’s auditing team will have direct access to our supply chain and they will report their findings independently on their website.” [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

The announcement also comes just after the company announced better-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings. The Financial Times reports that net income for the company rose 3 percent to $1.4 billion and revenues were up 11 percent to $20.1 billion.

The job cuts, reports the AP, were prompted to try and make up for the higher cost of ingredients and are expected to save the company $1.5 billion in the next three years.

The AP reports:

“At the same time it’s making cuts, PepsiCo also is planning to invest in its business.

“PepsiCo plans to increase advertising and marketing behind its brands by $500 million to $600 million in 2012, with a particular focus on North America.

“It also plans to invest $100 million on in store racks, displays and coolers. Additionally, it plans to increase dividends and share buybacks in 2012 to return cash to shareholders.”

[Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

The biggest chunk of the settlement will go toward reducing what underwater borrowers owe on their mortgages. (To be underwater on your mortgage is to owe more than your home is worth).

The settlement will help an estimated 1 million homeowners. But 11 million homeowners are underwater. And while many of those people will continue to pay their mortgage, others are likely to go into foreclosure.

In fact, the foreclosure process slowed significantly last year, as negotiations over the settlement dragged on and banks waited for the details to become clear. Now that there’s a settlement in place, the rate of foreclosures is likely to pick up.

Last year, banks repossessed just over 800,000 homes, according to RealtyTrac, a company that tracks this sort of thing. This year, that number is likely to be over 1 million, Daren Blomquist, a VP at RealtyTrac, told me this morning.

Another million homes are likely to be repossessed 2013, he said. In a normal year, by comparison, the figure would be below 500,000.

Repossessions are not only painful for the people who go through them; they tend to have a broader impact on the housing market, because foreclosed homes tend to sell at a discount.

In other words, it could still be years before the housing market gets back to something resembling normal. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

With congressional approval at all-time lows, the bill was widely seen by lawmakers as a small step in restoring public confidence. But differences remain to be worked out with a Senate measure, passed last week, before a bill could be sent to President Obama.

Many experts say it’s already illegal for members of Congress to trade stocks based on non-public information they obtain because of their role as lawmakers. But a report last fall on CBS’s “60 Minutes” raised questions about whether they are actually covered by insider trading laws.

The bill, which has languished in obscurity for years, gained more than 200 co-sponsors virtually overnight after the “60 Minutes” report.

“The intent is to get members of Congress not to trade on their information that they have through their work,” said Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., an original author of the measure.

In addition to explicitly banning insider trading by members of Congress and their staffs, members of Congress would be required to report financial transactions within 30 days, with information about trades posted online. Currently, paper disclosures are only required once a year.

The House bill left out a Senate-passed provision that would require people who work in the political intelligence industry to register much like lobbyists. Political intelligence firms gather information from members of Congress and their staffs and sell it to hedge funds and other investors looking for an advantage.

An earlier version of the House bill contained the provision, but when Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., introduced the version that the House ultimately approved, it had been removed. Cantor said the political intelligence provision raised too many questions and could have unintended consequences.

The likely next step is a conference committee, where the differences between the two bills could be worked out. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

The Associated Press reports that “a spokeswoman for the prime minister’s office says the agreement with the majority Socialists and the conservatives will allow alternative cuts to those rejected early Thursday during a meeting of the three coalition party leaders. She spoke on customary condition of anonymity.”

One of the sticking points to an agreement had been a demand from creditors that Greece make nearly $400 billion worth of pension cuts. It’s not known just yet how Greek lawmakers resolved that issue.

Previous austerity measures in Greece over the past year have sparked some riots.

Planet Money has previously explored “what’s wrong with Europe” and why the financial crisis there matters to the U.S. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]