Hello and welcome to the payday edition of Slate Money, your weekly guide to the Business and Finance News of the Week.

I'm Felix Salmon & Fusion in New York, and on the show this week, payday loans.

When do they become usurious?

That's one of my favorite words.

We'll also talk about BuzzFeed's new $850 million valuation.

And also in the world of big numbers, the super high salaries of data scientists.

We might have some big numbers in the numbers round, but I am not going to

tease them right now. We're losing that bit of the show this week. Instead, I'm going to

move swiftly on to introducing our regular guests. We have Kathy O'Neill, head of the lead

program for data journalism at Columbia University. Hi, Kathy. Hi, Felix.

And Slate's own money box columnist, Jordan Wiseman.

Hello, Felix.

Hello.

Very first, before we do anything else, I think I need to have a corrections column.

We will move on to the mailbag in a minute.

Oh, no.

What did I say?

It was me.

Oh, thank God.

It was me. I made a mistake last week when Kathy's talked about a stick and said that a stick was a million dollars. I said, yes. And then in foreign exchange, a yard is a million dollars. Of course, that was a brain fart. In foreign exchange, a yard is a billion dollars. I was only out by three orders

of magnitude. There are many people getting bonuses of that. Not very many billion dollar bonuses,

but there are billion dollar FX trades, not only every day, but hundreds of times a day. The

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