As if Cleveland needed any more trouble, the two leading banks in the city are rumored to be considering a merger or even an outright sale. According to The Wall Street Journal, KeyCorp. (NYSE: KEY) may acquire National City Corp. (NYSE: NCC). Buyout firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. could provide the capital for the buyout.

National City has had a difficult few months. The bank has a lot of exposure to the subprime mortgage market, and the company's stock has dropped from the mid $30s to about $10 in the last year. Although National City has a $1 billion stake in Visa (NYSE: V), it has laid off over 3,000 workers recently, and is likely to reduce staff even further. An acquisition by neighbor KeyCorp. would no doubt guarantee many more firings -- or "redundancies," as they say in Britain.

So far, these rumors are good news for KeyCorp, which is up nearly 5% to $24.66. For National City, it's a different story, with the stock down nearly 2% to $9.78. I guess the market thinks KeyCorp. will pick up some decent assets at fire sale prices. Let's hope that this isn't another mistake by the lake.

Reuters reports that the market value of some homes is less than the street price of their copper pipes. The result is that thieves are ripping out the pipes and selling them. Copper prices have risen 400% in the last three years while home prices fell 11% in the year ending January 2008 and could drop as much as 50% from the peak. This creates the ultimate domestic value play.

Here's the opening anecdote from Reuters: "Shards of broken glass outside the basement window of 31 Vine Street hint at the destruction inside the three-story home. Thieves smashed the window to break in and then gutted the property for its copper pipes -- a crime that has spread across the United States as the economy slows and foreclosed homes stand empty and vulnerable."

Demand for copper in China and India has boosted prices dramatically. Scrap copper sells for about $3.50 a pound, against 70 cents just three years ago. Scrap traders estimate that more than 80% of recycled copper is exported to China and India. So if a foreclosed home has, say, $5,000 worth of copper and is on the market for $100, investors could make a profit buying up the house, stripping out the copper, and selling it as scrap.

A CNNMoney piece looks at the rise of payday lending in Ohio, aided (or perhaps exacerbated is a better word) by the subprime debacle that has given many home owners with toxic mortgages difficulty making their payments.

While people probably aren't using payday loans directly to pay their mortgages, that's the net result: Soaring monthly payments are eating up a big chunk of their paychecks, and they're resorting to payday lending to pay for other expenses.

The problem with that is that, on an annualized basis, interest rates on payday loans can end up being well over 400%. However the lenders counter, not wrongly, that the loans are not meant to be used for a year so quoting an APR is meaningless -- They charge a service fee for a short-term cash advance.

Think before you answer.

What would a $200,000 salary get you in New York, and what in Cleveland? Well, let's strip it down:

• What would be your purchasing power after accounting for the cost of living? New York's cost of living, for example, is double the national average.
• What about effective tax rates? The tax rate in New York is 25.4% for the $200K salary vs. a tax rate of 20.4% in Cleveland for the $100K salary.
• Different inflation rates? May annual inflation rate in New York metropolitan area was 4.8%, in Cleveland, the rate was 3%.

All these should be considered before deciding. So, have you changed your answer?

Let's start by saying that if you have that choice (of making a six figure salary), then congratulations are in order. You are part of the 5% of Americans who do (according to 2004 census reports). But the real question is - where do you live?

CNNMoney.com used data from 6FigureJobs.com and TheLadders.com to figure out the equivalent of $100,000 after adjusting for the cost of living in the top cities that have the largest numbers of six figures jobs listings. In New York, a $100,000 equivalent salary would require a salary of over $205,000, in Boston more than $137,000, about $101,000 in Cleveland and less than $89,000 in Houston.

So while many six figure jobs are indeed offered in higher cost of living areas, there are still many cities such as Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Cleveland and Denver as well as a few others that also have relatively high numbers of six figures jobs to offer. And as if that isn't enough to convince you, sometimes, just to attract talent, companies in those "lesser" cities would offer the same high salaries as in, say, New York.

Apple ended the day at $57.43, down $1.56, a sudden 2.64% slide. The internet is still trying to figure out whether more information can be found about Apple's working conditions at Foxconn, or whether it is an unfounded attack. Meanwhile, the normally media savvy computer maker's special investigation team signed off on the factor conditions, and Apple has not really responded to the growing coverage in mac-focused blogs and sites.

A new, very minor update to Apple's operating system was released today. The next major version of the system will be previewed at WWDC, a developers conference for Apple, on August 7th. The next version of the OS will come out in late 2006 or early 2007.

Also, a new store seems to be in the pipeline for Cleveland, bringing the brand further into the heartland.

[Disclosure: I own Apple stock at the date of this post]