The “Grapes of Wrath” theme plays out in the article’s final paragraph:

Still, many states would envy Oklahoma at the moment. And its leaders are trying to take advantage. Natalie Shirley, the state’s commerce secretary, says that a few years ago she had the idea of getting a list of Oklahoma university graduates sorted by age, course and zip code. Her office sent out a volley of postcards to young engineers who had scattered around the country, directing them to a website that had a list of job openings and a cost-of-living calculator. Between 2005 and 2007 Oklahoma had some 6,000 transplants from California. The grapes of wrath taste a little sweeter now.

To see the entire column, click here.

Don Mecoy
Business Writer

Let’s start with a glimpse at buildings still standing from 1907. Real Estate Editor Richard Mize wrote this story in 2007:

In Oklahoma City, the Panic of 1907 might better be remembered as more of a temporary feeling of vague anxiety.

The seven-story, 49,500-square-foot limestone building at Dean A. McGee and Broadway avenues was the headquarters for Pioneer Telephone Co. until it merged in 1916 with what became the Bell System. “delicately styled structure was a masterpiece of aesthetic functionalism,” Blackburn, Henderson and Thurman wrote in “The Physical Legacy.” William A. Wells — whose mentor was Louis A. Sullivan, considered the father of the skyscraper — designed the building.

But are there older buildings still standing?
The best candidates that come to mind are the old India Temple Building at Broadway and Robert S. Kerr, which has a concrete facade that was added in the 1950s by Kerr McGee, the old Sherman Iron Works building in Bricktown, and the Wells Fargo building in Bricktown (1906), and the Harn Homestead (1904).

Are there any survivors from the 1800s? Glancing at the National Historic Register, the answer at first appearance may be be “no.” But more digging might turn up some interesting clues….

The second quarter was not a good one for much of the U.S. banking industry. Profits plummeted 86.5 percent to the second-lowest quarterly total since 1991, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. reported this week.

The biggest factor was higher loan-loss provisions, which totaled $50.2 billion. That’s more than four times the $11.4 billion quarterly total of a year ago.

Losses tied to bad loans also put a hurt on many banks, the FDIC noted in its Quarterly Banking Profile:

Loan losses registered a sizable jump in the second quarter, as loss rates on real estate loans increased sharply at many large lenders. Net charge-offs of loans and leases totaled $26.4 billion in the second quarter, almost triple the $8.9 billion that was charged off in the second quarter of 2007. The annualized net charge-off rate in the second quarter was 1.32 percent, compared to 0.49 percent a year earlier. This is the highest quarterly charge-off rate for the industry since the fourth quarter of 1991.

Things are better in Oklahoma, with a few notable exceptions (as we’ll be reporting in The Oklahoman soon).

Don Mecoy
Business Writer

Think BIG!

Don Mecoy
Business Writer

We knew the Google was everywhere, but now we know just how big everywhere is — 1 trillion unique URLs.

From the official Google blog:

This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it’d be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.

However, if you weed out pages reserved by domain squatters, pornography and personal blogs that contain less than a dozen posts, the number drops significantly.

If your earnest and funny but unread blog is not among the 1 trillion indexed pages, you can enter it here.

Don Mecoy
Business Writer

If it seems like we’ve got a lot of Wal-Marts in Oklahoma, it’s because we do. After the company was founded in Arkansas, Oklahoma was one of the first states it built in. Now data analyst Nathan Yau has produced a fascinating look at the explosive growth of the world’s largest retailer.

Like Kudzu, the growth is concentrated in the South.

Other than its native Arkansas, Wal-Mart may be most closely aligned with Oklahoma.

Wal-Mart built its first Sam’s Club in Midwest City. The company employs more than 33,000 Oklahomans as associates. The average wage for Wal-Mart’s regular, full-time hourly associates in the Sooner state is $10.31. The company operates 71 Supercenters; 14 discount stores; 16 neighborhood markets, eight Sam’s Clubs and two distribution centers in Oklahoma.

In it’s most recent fiscal year, Wal-Mart spent more than $655 million on merchandise and services with Oklahoma suppliers. In that same period, the company collected more than $483 million in sales taxes in Oklahoma, and paid more than $23.1 million in state and local taxes in Oklahoma.

I would add that despite the thousands of Oklahoma associates, only about 5 percent of the cash registers seem to be in operation at any Wal-Mart I visit even during the busiest shopping times.

Don Mecoy
Business Writer