Musk responded, on Twitter, with a mixture of sincerity and snark: “As many have already noted, @Chrysler is a division of Fiat, an Italian company. We specifically said first *US* company.”

And then: “More importantly, @Chrysler failed to pay back $1.3B. Apart those 2 points, you were totally 1st.”

Oh, snap.

Tesla’s taunting of other car companies wasn’t confined to Twitter. Check out the company’s press release announcing the payment: “Following this payment, Tesla will be the only American car company to have fully repaid the government,” the company said. Tesla noted that the program under which it received the credit, the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Loan Program, was created by President Bush in 2008. “This program is often confused with the financial bailouts provided to the then bankrupt GM and Chrysler, who were ineligible for the ATVM program, because a requirement of that program was good financial health.”

While noting the positive developments, Bernanke said the economy is still sort of meh. So what’s the problem? In a word: government. I’ve noted that we are living in a Golden Age of Deficit Reduction™—the combination of higher taxes, the end of the payroll-tax holiday, the sequester, and growth are helping to bring down the deficit rapidly. The Congressional Budget Office now projects the fiscal 2013 deficit will be $642 billion, down $441 billion, or 41 percent from $1.089 trillion in fiscal 2012. That’s huge. But it may be too much, too soon.

Indeed, Bernanke complained that fiscal policy was dampening growth. First, for the last few years, state and local governments, which have to balance budgets every year, have been hacking spending and employment. “Notably, over the past four years, state and local governments have cut civilian government employment by roughly 700,000 jobs, and total government employment has fallen by more than 800,000 jobs over the same period,” Bernanke noted. I’ve dubbed this the “conservative recovery,” since all the jobs growth has come from the private sector. That’s not how it usually goes, even when Republicans are in the White House. Bernanke: “For comparison, over the four years following the trough of the 2001 recession, total government employment rose by more than 500,000 jobs.”

Now that states are doing much better, with many sporting surpluses, the job carnage is ending. But if it’s not one thing, it’s another.  While states may be loosening up, Bernanke noted, “at the same time, though, fiscal policy at the federal level has become significantly more restrictive. In particular, the expiration of the payroll-tax cut, the enactment of tax increases, the effects of the budget caps on discretionary spending, the onset of the sequestration, and the declines in defense spending for overseas military operations are expected, collectively, to exert a substantial drag on the economy this year.” How much? Bernanke noted that “the deficit-reduction policies in current law will slow the pace of real GDP growth by about 1 1/2 percentage points during 2013, relative to what it would have been otherwise.” That doesn’t sound like much. But 1.5 percent of GDP represents more than $200 billion in economic activity.

Congress, of course, is the main culprit here. But the White House is complicit as well. So too are the professional deficit hawks, who, having failed to encourage a grand bargain, continue to advocate for more cuts in the face of massive deficit reduction. Bernanke suggested that Congress ease up on the whole budget-cutting thing. The U.S. still has long-term issues, Bernanke noted, but that’s no reason to let the sequester continue. To boost short-term growth and ward off giant long-term deficits, “the Congress and the administration could consider replacing some of the near-term fiscal restraint now in law with policies that reduce the federal deficit more gradually in the near term but more substantially in the longer run.”

In April, the GSA announced the federal government will buy up to 10,000 new hybrid vehicles.

That’s good news for tree-huggers, auto manufacturers, and deficit hawks—and given the changes in the auto manufacturing world, it’s likely to raise far fewer hackles than it would have a few years ago.

Hybrid cars are hardly an embryonic technology. They’re tried and tested products, with millions of units sold globally. In April, according to Hybridcars.com, more than 42,000 hybrids were sold in the U.S. alone.

The knock on hybrids has been that they tend to cost more than similar models that run only on gasoline. And even with the price of gas pushing $4.00 per gallon, it takes a long time (or a lot of driving) for a purchaser to earn back the higher price paid through lower gas consumption. Buying a hybrid may make moral and environmental sense from day one. But in order for it to produce economic benefits, you’ve got to hold on to the car for several years and drive it a lot. Which is why the most enthusiastic purchasers of hybrids (aside from the bienpensant of Boulder and Berkeley) have been the sort of owners who view vehicle ownership as a long-term business proposition. It’s common to see hybrids in taxi and corporate delivery fleets.

While the supply of debt fell, demand remained constant. People still need a safe place to put money in this turbulent world. And so this week, the U.S. government sold $20 billion of 28-day bills with an interest rate of zero. That’s right. Rational people forked over $20 billion in cash to the U.S. Treasury Department, said they’d be back to pick it up on June 6, and didn’t demand any interest.

What in the name of Keynes is going on?

We’ve discussed this before. But it bears repeating: The miracle cure for deficits—last fiscal year it was $1.089 trillion—is growth and higher taxes. Now we’re getting both. In the U.S. today there are two million more people working than a year ago, at slightly higher wages. That translates into more payroll and income taxes. Payroll taxes were raised substantially on January 1, 2013, from 4.2 percent of the first $133,700 to 6.2 percent. And higher taxes on the investment and regular income of very high earners went into effect as well. What’s more, in anticipation of the higher taxes, companies in 2012 shoveled dividends and bonuses out the door in late 2012. In the first few months of 2013, especially in April, people had to pay tax on all that income.

The upshot has been a gusher of income. In the first six months of 2013, revenues rose 12.5 percent from the year before. Meanwhile, thanks to declining spending on unemployment benefits, winding down of two wars, and the sequester, spending fell—about 2.4 percent in the first six months of fiscal 2013. The trends continued—and probably accelerated—in April. CBO estimated that the government reported a surplus of $122 billion in April 2013—more than twice the size of the surplus it notched in April 2012.

Charney, who sells $600 million worth of clothes a year, understands the business and the pressures that suppliers face. American Apparel has 249 stores in the U.S. and 20 other countries and manufactures clothing for other companies.

All clothing manufacturers are under intense pressure. Miss a deadline, and you own the goods. “If you’re in Bangladesh and you don’t put the merchandise on a boat by a certain date, you’re done. You’re out of business. You’ll do anything to get those goods out,” says Charney. That mindset encourages cutting corners and pushing employees and facilities to the limit, all while constantly looking for the lowest possible price, he says.

In the 21st century, most companies outsource production to overseas contractors and subcontractors, who scour the globe for the cheapest possible labor. But Charney has borrowed a page from industrialists of the early 20th century, pursuing a strategy of so-called vertical integration, which means it makes almost all the clothes it sells in a factory in Los Angeles. And, as Henry Ford did a century ago, American Apparel strives to pay an above-market wage. The company says, “The average sewer with experience at American Apparel is making about $25,000/yr, or $12 an hour, almost twice the federal minimum.” The company also provide benefits including “subsidized public transport, subsidized lunches, free on-site massages, a bike lending program,” low-cost health insurance, and a medical clinic. In contrast to some other companies that keep information about their supply chains opaque, American Apparel invites people to explore its factory online.

Charney is a controversial character. He has been accused of flaunting norms of employer-employee relationships and has exhibited an openness about sexuality not common among CEOs of publicly held companies. As The New York Times noted in an April 2011 article: “Mr. Charney masturbated in front of a female reporter from now-defunct Jane magazine. In 2008 he was lampooned on ‘Saturday Night Live’ for walking around the office in his underpants.” Charney has also been on the receiving end of several sexual-harassment lawsuits, virtually all of which have been thrown out, dismissed, or settled.

Dimon shouldn’t worry too much. Sure, the age of the imperial CEO may be coming to an end, in corporate America as a whole and in Wall Street in particular; many CEOs are on short leashes, battling declining tenures and increasingly aggressive boards and outsider shareholders. But Dimon, 57, who has been running JPMorgan Chase since the beginning of 2006, is an exception in many ways.

Duff McDonald’s excellent biography of Dimon was aptly titled Last Man Standing, in part because Dimon was one of the few Wall Street executives to emerge through the 2008 financial crisis with his job, fortune, and reputation intact. JPMorgan Chase, like every other bank, made plenty of poor, ultimately costly decisions in the credit boom years. But under Dimon, the bank made less of them than all of its peers, and it had more capital going into the bust. While the bank availed itself of TARP funds and all sorts of crisis-era programs aimed at helping the banks, Dimon and JPMorgan Chase always claimed that they didn’t really need the help.

That was bollocks, of course. The bank issued tens of billions of dollars in low-cost debt guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and benefited mightily from the government’s decision to assume formally the debts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Absent the extraordinary assistance from the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department, and the American taxpayer, every bank—including JPMorgan Chase—would have gone bust in late 2008 or early 2009.

Meanwhile, events since the crisis have proven that JPMorgan Chase wasn’t (and isn’t) particularly well managed. As Nina Strochlic documents, the bank has repeatedly been forced to settle consumer lawsuits and regulatory charges and investigations relating to: dealings with mortgage borrowers and mortgage investors; foreclosing on active-duty military personnel; rigging bids in the municipal bond market; financial dealing with countries covered by U.S. sanctions; and overcharging for checking overdrafts. The total tab for the company’s missteps has run in the billions.

The life of a top executive may be cushy and full of perks. But for many, it has also become Hobbesian—nasty, brutish, and short. Two years is the new 10 years. Executives present three-year plans, only to see the plug pulled after 18 months. An April report from consulting firm Booz Allen showed that in 2012, 15 percent of the world’s largest 2,500 companies replaced their CEOs—the second-highest figure in the 13 years it has compiled the data. (In 2011 14 percent of this class of executives were replaced.) The typical tenure of an elite CEO is now about 5.9 years. “CEOs these days are given one term in office,” said John Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the Chicago-based outplacement and executive coaching firm, analogizing bosses to U.S. presidents. “If they’re very successful, they might get four more years.”

To be sure, many old-line, established firms—UPS, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola—have rational long-term succession plans that are neatly telegraphed. Jack Welch lasted as CEO of General Electric for 20 years, and his successor, Jeff Immelt, will soon mark 12 years on the job. But over the past five years, an average of nearly 1,300 CEOs have resigned, retired, or been fired each year, according to Challenger. Welcome to the age of the short leash.

Several factors are behind this trend. Rapid changes in technology, social media, the markets, investing, and sheer exhaustion have all combined to attenuate the life span of a hotshot CEO. Just as we have come to expect the highest levels of immediacy in service, whether we’re buying a new book or purchasing airplane tickets, we have become impatient with the leadership of large organizations. In the age of Twitter, there’s no such thing as patient money.

While it looks pretty good at first blush, the April jobs figure is likely to look even better in hindsight. After reporting the monthly figure, the BLS then revises the figure in each of the next two months. And since the economy began growing again in 2009, the trend has generally been for BLS to revise these figures higher. Justin Wolfers of the University of Michigan noted that over the course of 2010, BLS added 480,000 jobs through such revisions, 340,000 in 2011, and 330,000 in 2012. So far, this year is no different. The February figure, originally reported as 236,000, was revised upward to 268,000 in March. Today, the BLS revised that figure up to an impressive 332,000. March’s payroll-jobs figure, originally reported as an anemic gain of 88,000, was revised to 136,000. In effect, BLS discovered an additional 114,000 jobs in the economy.

The jobs growth is good. But wage growth is less impressive. One of the major—and frustrating—features of this recovery has been that capital is beating the living daylights out of labor. Companies have been able to rack up record profits and are demanding that employers work harder and more productively without necessarily paying them more. Why? There’s a lot of slack in the labor force, unions have declined in power, and there’s a pervasive sense among CEOs that they just don’t need to pay more. This trend continued last month. “In April,” BLS noted, “average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose by 4 cents to $23.87. Over the year, average hourly earnings have risen by 45 cents, or 1.9 percent.” That’s weak. And we are nearing a point where we will really need companies to start giving it up if the expansion is going to continue.

Why? Well, fiscal policy—the sequester, declining defense spending, higher taxes—is now acting as a drag on the economy. April was the first full month in which the effects of the sequester would be seen in employment. The federal government cut 8,000 jobs in April. More broadly, what I’ve dubbed the “conservative recovery” is still intact. Each month for the past three years, the private sector has added positions, and each month for the last three years, the public sector—federal, state, and local government—cuts jobs.

This dynamic usually doesn’t happen in an economic expansion. But it’s been going on for a few years thanks to austerity at the federal level and the continual needs of state and local governments to balance their budgets. In April, while the private sector added 176,000 jobs, the public sector cut 11,000 jobs—8,000 from federal payrolls, 1,000 from state payrolls, and 2,000 from local government payrolls. The budget picture may be improving across the country, but it’s not leading to more government employment yet. Since February 2010, the private sector has added 6.78 million jobs. Since May 2010, the public sector has cut 1.147 million jobs.

The big challenge facing companies as the bull market and expansion roll into their fourth year is that demand is weak—in the U.S., in Europe, and even in China. Companies have been ingenious about making money amid lethargic growth, and even more shrewd about doing so without sharing their bounty with workers. Corporate profits have soared from $1.1 trillion in 2008 to $1.95 trillion in 2012. As a percentage of gross domestic product, they’ve never been higher. The amount of cash on companies’ books has risen from $1.39 trillion in 2008 to $1.79 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2012—also a record. Meanwhile, U.S. median family income has actually fallen since 2009. And over the past 12 months, average hourly wages rose a scant 1.8 percent. The cartoon image of a CEO shouldn’t be Mr. Burns of The Simpsons. It should be Scrooge McDuck, lounging amid piles of golden coins.

The divergence of wages and profits has been great news for stockholders. But it’s hard for Apple and other firms to keep earnings growing if the pace of sales growth wanes. That’s happening now, in large measure because the workers of the world simply don’t have enough money in their pockets. Here’s an astonishing factoid: with $145 billion, Apple has about 8 percent of corporate America’s total cash stash. Yet its stock has fallen nearly 40 percent since last fall, in part on fears of a sales slowdown. Cook & Co. are fighting back by shoveling cash out the door to investors. But returning capital to shareholders is like giving water to people who already have an unlimited supply of champagne, Perrier, and freshly pressed pomegranate juice. It’s stimulus for the 1 percent—hedge funds, mutual funds, individual stock owners, senior Apple employees.

A more radical, disruptive, Apple-like, think-different approach would be for Cook to move some of the cash from his balance sheet onto the balance sheets of people who would spend it on consumer goods—like the 42,600 people who work at relatively low wages at the company’s 402 stores; or the contractors and vendors who run its cafeterias; or the architects who are designing Apple’s futuristic new corporate headquarters; or the armies of low-paid workers at Foxconn factories in China who assemble cheap generic components into expensive Apple-branded products. Lord knows Apple could afford to. The company’s profit margin in the most recent quarter was a stunning 37 percent.

Tsinghua’s president first approached Schwarzman in 2010 and asked him to consider creating a program that would attract more international students for the university’s 100th anniversary in 2011. “The problem was addressing the potential tensions that would develop between China and the developed world, as a result of China growing at two to three times the rate of the developed world,” he said. Rolling this trend forward, Schwarzman foresaw an “increasing probability of trade tensions and economic tensions and potentially military tensions.”

One way to alleviate tensions would be to create something like the Rhodes Scholarship Program, which sends 32 American students to British universities for a year and whose alumni include former president Bill Clinton. “We’ll take those types of candidates to China so that they get immersed in that environment, learn to understand it on a firsthand basis, and give them a special look at it,” Schwarzman says. Beyond taking classes, Schwarzman scholars will meet Chinese leaders, travel to various regions of China, and have a mentor assigned to them. “They’ll go to the mentor’s place of work, see how businesses operate, and meet their families,” Schwarzman says. “And that would be another mechanism for these students getting a unique look besides getting a master’s degree.” The first class of scholars will fly over to Beijing—in coach, Schwarzman notes—in June 2016.

The program is just getting started (the website can be seen here) and is seeking to raise $300 million. Schwarzman kicked in $100 million; donors including companies such as BP, Boeing, General Electric, JPMorgan Chase, and people like hedge-fund managers Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates have committed another $100 million; and Schwarzman is looking for $100 million more. In classic private equity fashion, Schwarzman has leveraged his contribution into a naming opportunity. (His name is also on the main building of the New York Public Library, to which he contributed $100 million.)

There is, of course, a big difference between the Schwarzman Scholarship on one hand and the Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships on the other: the destination. Many American universities have rushed into new geographic areas that have not been traditional outposts of freedom of expression and academic inquiry—i.e., the Persian Gulf and Asia. Schwarzman said he has no concerns about sending students to a Chinese university for graduate study. “They’ve made the development of their universities into world-scale standards as a major governmental priority,” he said. “And to do that and attract Western students of the type that we are discussing, there has to be free and open discourse in the classroom.” Sure, he acknowledges, “there will be some limitations as they encounter the greater society, and that’s part of the educational experience.”

Despite the tendency of economists and corporate executives to make bold, certain forecasts for the coming year, or coming two years, economic affairs generally don’t unfold in a rational, linear manner. We are constantly being presented with seemingly random events, flocks of so-called Black Swans. Underneath the most placid waters, there are vicious currents and tides, and underwater volcanoes that are constantly erupting.

In late December—or even in late February—nobody would have predicted the procession of events that unfolded in late March and early April: the collapse of Cyprus; the apparent humbling of Apple; a sharp slowdown in China; a puncturing of a gold bubble; the rise and fall of a bizarre alternate currency called Bitcoin; Japan’s extremely aggressive move for quantitative easing in a belated, desperate attempt to spur inflation and growth; a horrifying attack on the Boston Marathon. Back then, the beard-strokers and chin-tuggers were fixated on the developments that seemed to be right in front of their faces, like the negative impact of the payroll tax and the sequester, or the prospect that the U.S. Federal Reserve might begin to curtail its easy-money policies in the face of a strengthening jobs market.

Lakshman Achuthan of the Economic Cycles Research Institute notes that a great deal of economic forecasting consist of simple extrapolation from existing trends. But in the last few weeks we’ve seen a series of sharp discontinuities, events that don’t fit into an existing narrative. This volatility can be very damaging to individuals who make leveraged bets on the continuation of a strong existing trend. Like if you borrowed money to buy gold futures. Hedge-fund manager John Paulson soared to prominence and phenomenal wealth by betting against subprime mortgages before the financial crisis, and then by plunging into gold after the crisis. As Bloomberg reported, the decline in gold so far this year has cost him about $1.5 billion personally. Investors in his concentrated gold fund have likely lost even more. A similar fate would have befallen those who borrowed against their homes to purchase calls on Apple stock last summer.

April has also provided a case study in the volatility of the reputation and fame of others who rose to prominence in the financial crisis. In their bestselling book, This Time Is Different, economists Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart exhaustively and dispassionately delve into the history of what happens to national economies in the wake of financial crises. Many of their findings—especially the fact that when national debt rises above 90 percent of GDP, economies slip into prolonged periods of slow growth—were seized upon as ironclad rules by the global claque of pro-austerity policymakers. Their research translated into phenomenal book sales and admiring features. But earlier this month, three scholars at the University of Massachusetts debunked several of the findings of Rogoff and Reinhart. It turns out the original scholarship involved a crucial Excel coding error and omitted important data. With the econo-blogosphere abuzz, Rogoff and Reinhart were forced to concede some errors and sheepishly walk back a portion of their conclusions. Pointing to a spike in Google searches for the two authors, University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers tweeted: “fame, then infamy.”

Now, monthly numbers can move around—if a big tax payment comes in on March 31 one year and arrives on April 1 the next year, or if a benefits payment that went out on March 1, 2012, instead went out on Feb. 28, 2013. So it’s useful to look at the trend. The fiscal year is now six months old. And guess what? It shows more deficit melting. Through the first six months of this fiscal year, revenues are $1.196 trillion, up 12.5 percent from $1.063 trillion in the first six months of fiscal 2012. Meanwhile, the government has spent $1.797 trillion in the first six months of fiscal 2013, down 2.4 percent compared with the first six months of fiscal 2012. The deficit for the first half of the fiscal year is $600.5 billion, down 22.5 percent from $775 billion in the first half of fiscal 2012.

The last six months of the fiscal year are always good ones for the government, as tax payments tend to produce surpluses in April and again in September. Should the current trends continue for the rest of the year, we’ll be looking at an annual deficit of about $850 billion for fiscal year 2013, down from $1.089 trillion in fiscal 2012. (The Obama administration projects a $972 billion deficit for the current fiscal year, but it will surely be less than that.) Put another way, that’s $240 billion in deficit reduction in a single fiscal year—in the absence of a grand bargain. The reduction is even more impressive when you consider that in fiscal 2009, the deficit was more than $1.4 trillion. It’s hard to envision a time in recent history when the deficit has shrunk so much in dollar terms in the space of four years.

And in theory, there’s more to come. The budget Obama presented, which is naturally dead on arrival, continues the spending restraint. Next year it projects spending will rise 2.5 percent. It aims to increase revenues by doing things like getting rid of the absurd carried-interest tax break for private equity and hedge-fund managers. Should all the proposals become law, the administration projects revenues will rise nearly 12 percent in fiscal 2014, leaving a deficit of $744 billion.

That’s still big. But it would represent as a decline of 47 percent in four years. And what ultimately matters isn’t the sheer size of the annual deficit but its size in relation to the economy. That’s shrinking too. The ratio of the primary deficit to GDP has been falling rapidly, from 10.1 percent of GDP in 2009 to a projected 6 percent in fiscal 2013 (it’ll probably be less), and 4.4 percent of GDP in fiscal 2014.

For lots of workers, food and drink—caffeine, sugar, carbs, proteins—are fuel, no less than the electricity that powers the computers and telephones. And it is in the best interest of companies to ensure that employees are fueled efficiently. Encourage people to wander outside for a slice of pizza at lunchtime, and they might be apt to take a long walk, or idle in the park. In New York, a coffee break involves waiting for an elevator, going outside, and then waiting on line. If you provide people with the calories and caffeine they need to get through the day, you eliminate time-consuming breaks.  Take away people’s excuse for not working, and you boost productivity.

Before he became the anti-junk-food mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg was a pioneer in the corporate provision of junk food. For decades, Bloomberg has made available to employees—at no charge—the entire contents of a convenience store. What started as coffee, chips, and cookies (snacks, not meals), quickly expanded to things that were like meals (fresh fruit, cereal and oatmeal for breakfast, cans of tuna fish, soup, and noodle packets for lunch).

At many workplaces, food and snacks are deployed selectively – as morale builders. Companies routinely order in pizzas when teams are crashing on a deadline, or provide meals on nights when the entire staff has to stay late. Again, this is not a way of paying employees. Rather, it’s a way of reducing the friction and hardship involved in working overtime and under unusual circumstances.

Many companies run cafeterias where the meals aren’t free, but are subsidized: Time Inc., Sears, Goldman Sachs, and factories all over the place. These corporate food courts and chow lines aren’t another way of paying people. Rather, they serve a corporate goal. If you run a factory five miles from town or your offices are in a huge campus a few miles from stores, you want to keep people on the premises to ensure maximum productivity. If you’re running a precision manufacturing operations, you need people on the lines at precisely the right times. Providing meals on-site—free, subsidized, or market rate—is a way of ensuring that workers will be in the right place at the right time.

While they have been involved with many well-known brands, the Metropouloses (Metropouli?) have a relatively low media profile. Their firm doesn’t have a corporate website. And they’re not big on the private-equity conference circuit.

But they’ve as scored a big hit with Pabst, which they acquired in May 2010 for $250 million. PBR was already on the upswing when Metropoulos & Co. acquired it. The long-neglected brand had been adopted by hipsters and was growing smartly in a U.S. beer market that had long since gone flat. After the acquisition, they repaired relationships with distributors, fixed the pricing, brought the company’s information technology systems into the 21st century, and focused on smart, inexpensive guerrilla and field marketing: employing people with tattoos to go to music festivals and events.

“Pabst has become a lifestyle brand, much like Monster Energy and Red Bull,” said Daren Metropoulos. “There is a trend-setting community, 21 and over, that prides themselves on being trendsetters. They revolted against horses being jammed down their throats and 30-second commercials.” PBR, Evan noted, is now sold at retailers like Whole Foods alongside craft brands.

There’s more to the company than PBR—it owns dozens of smaller, regional brands, many of which are growing rapidly. “We’ve seen the same organic growth in Rainier in the Pacific Northwest, Bohemian in Maryland, and Lone Star in Texas,” said Evan Metropoulos. And they haven’t shied away from enlisting celebrities in high-profile marketing campaigns: Snoop Dogg has become associated with Colt 45, and Will Ferrell has starred in Old Milwaukee commercials.