News and stats you need to know 11/4/12

The bottom line

Just one year out of college, women make only 82 percent of what their male peers are paid, according to a new study. It found that the gender pay gap, typically attributed to mothers leaving the workforce or men choosing higher-paid fields, exists even among young employees who had the same majors and were unlikely to have children yet. The
Washington Post

The U.S. economy grew 2 percent over the past three months, its fastest pace all year, thanks to strong gains in housing and consumer spending. But the annualized growth rate this year is just 1.7 percent, below last year’s tepid 1.8 percent and 2010’s 2.4 percent. Associated Press

College students who say their parents argued about money when they were growing up are twice as likely to have more than two credit cards as those whose parents didn’t—and three times as likely to have a large amount of debt. Time.com

Former Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta was sentenced to two years in prison last week for leaking insider secrets to former hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam. Gupta is the most prominent executive yet to face prison time in the government’s crackdown on insider trading. The Wall Street Journal

Online readers helped U.S. newspapers avoid a steep decline in circulation this year. Average daily circulation at the country’s 613 dailies fell 0.2 percent for the six months ending in September from a year earlier, but digital readers accounted for 15.3 percent of the total, up from 9.8 percent last year. The New York Times
Bank robber has last laugh

Who says crime doesn’t pay? said Katy Dartford in The Daily Mail (U.K.). An Austrian court has ordered that stolen cash be given to a bank robber because it “can’t find anybody else to take the money.” In 1993, bank manager Otto Neuman made off with more than $240,000 in cash and gold bars. By the time he was caught, just $82,000 could be recovered, and the money has been sitting at the Austrian Justice Ministry ever since. The bank won’t claim the cash because its insurance company covered the loss. The insurer also refused the money, since the gold that was recovered had “substantially increased in value” and erased losses from the payout. So a court awarded the funds to Neuman, who served three and a half years in jail for the robbery. “To say that he was surprised was an understatement,” said Neuman’s lawyer.