This week, Texans watched a meteorite burn up in the atmosphere leaving a few glowing pebbles in the scrub for astronomers to recover. It turns out that when 3,000 people accepted positions in the Bush administration, they thought they were hitching their career wagons to a star. Now, it looks more like their careers were attached to that flaming out meteorite instead. How so?

With the national unemployment rate at 7.6%, the unemployment rate among those Bush appointees is 75%. Or put another way, only about 25% of those 3,000 folks have found jobs. It turns out that this unemployment rate is much higher than for former Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton staffers -- about half of which had jobs within a month of leaving their government posts.

David Stockman probably wishes he was back in Ronald Reagan's woodshed.

The former director of the Office of Management and Budget is in deep trouble, indicted along with other executives of misleading investors about the deteriorating financial condition of auto-parts maker Collins & Aikman where he was CEO. Stockman told the Wall Street Journal that he intends to vigorously fight the charges. He's also facing an enforcement action from the Securities & Exchange Commission.

When Stockman left government, he became a private equity investor. He joined Collins & Aikman in 2002, after his firm Heartland Industrial Partners bought a controlling stake in the auto parts maker. Both Stockman and Collins & Aikman lost hundreds of millions of dollars when Collins & Aikman filed for bankruptcy, Reuters said. Collins & Aikman hasn't been charged in the case.

Stockman's defense will be have to contend with the four former company executives who have pleaded guilty to criminal charges related to the alleged scheme which lasted from 2001 until 2005 when Collins & Aikman filed for bankruptcy, the Journal said.

In an interview with the Journal (subscription required), Stockman argued that the government's case consisted of "hypertechnical accounting and disclosure items." One of those instances according to prosecutors was a 2005 conference call about an earnings restatement where Stockman "lied" when he said Collins & Aikman wasn't facing a liquidity crisis, the paper said. He's also accused of lying to the company's auditors and lenders.

The case will have an impact throughout the burgeoning private equity world. Bloomberg News said Stockman said he and his fund suffered a $360 million loss from the Collins & Aikman collapse, and that he personally lost $13 million.

Stockman's case will stir up memories of his government service. Stockman's influence with Reagan waned when he gave an interview to a journalist when he expressed skepticism about the administration fiscal policy. Those troubles pale in comparison to what he's facing today.

The market was looking like it would open up this morning. That is, until 8:30 a.m. when the wholesale inflation report came in at more than twice the rate economists had expected. Now the market is expected to drop. Will the Plunge Protection Team (PPT) step in as it may have done yesterday?

The reason the market reversed is that with higher than expected inflation, the Fed is less likely to cut interest rates. The Fed wants to keep core inflation between 1% and 2%, but when the PPI rises 1.3% in a month -- instead of the expected 0.6% -- investors fear that the Fed will need to raise rates to keep inflation within its target range. Is the Fed serious though? Last week, a productivity report noted that unit labor costs rose 6.6% in the last quarter of 2006. Although bonuses figured into the statistic, the slower growth in productivity suggests that wage inflation could be a future concern.

My guess is, though, that the Fed has a more complex goal -- it's torn between the desire to control inflation and the need to avoid sinking the economy too much. As this report from Fortune suggests, people with adjustable rate mortgages can get into trouble quickly when those rates rise. With two-thirds of economic growth coming from consumer spending, a rise in interest rates could then reduce the heavily leveraged consumer's ability to keep spending.