From extreme weather to wage slavery to global warming, here’s some suggested reading for this wet Marathon Sunday.

• “Finance pros overwhelmingly believe that clear action must be taken on deficit reduction to accelerate economic growth in 2012, and more than half think that tax increases should not be taken off the table to achieve a deficit reduction agreement, according to a survey by the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP).

• SEC Charges Wachovia With Fraudulent Bid Rigging in Municipal Bond Proceeds. “The SEC alleges that Wachovia generated millions of dollars in illicit gains during an eight-year period when it fraudulently rigged at least 58 municipal bond reinvestment transactions in 25 states and Puerto Rico. Wachovia won some bids through a practice known as “last looks” in which it obtained information from the bidding agents about competing bids. It also won bids through “set-ups” in which the bidding agent deliberately obtained non-winning bids from other providers in order to rig the field in Wachovia’s favor. Wachovia facilitated some bids rigged for others to win by deliberately submitting non-winning bids.”

Here’s a bit more on the case from the San Francisco Chronicle.

• The official Congressional Directory is available on the Federal Digital System, according to a press release from the Government Printing Office. Other major sources available through the FDS include the Congressional Record, Federal Register, Congressional Hearings, Code of Federal Regulations, federal court opinions, and others.

• “We’ll have to work ’till we die.” That’s essentially what more Americans are saying these days, according to the nonpartisan Employee Benefit Research Institute. The EBRI study examines data from the University of Michigan’s Health and Retirement Survey on how the expected retirement ages of older Americans changed during the period of 2006–2010, covering the periods just before, during, and after the recent economic recession.

• The National Association of Home Builders blames some of the lingering housing collapse on appraisals that compare new homes to vacant foreclosed properties.

One out of three builders are reporting losing signed sales contracts during the preceding six months because appraisals on their homes are less than the contract sales price, according to a recent nationwide survey conducted by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB).

“The inappropriate use of distressed and foreclosed sales as comparables in determining new home values is needlessly driving down home prices, killing home sales, causing more workers to lose their jobs and delaying a housing and economic recovery,” said NAHB Chairman Bob Nielsen, a home builder from Reno, Nev.

Too often, due to faulty appraisal practices, brand new homes with sparkling appliances and interior upgrades get compared to a distressed property that has been sitting vacant and in disrepair. The result, in many cases has been that the new house winds up getting appraised at less than the cost of construction.

• According to the National Resources Defense Council, there “there were at least 2,941 monthly weather records broken by extreme events that struck communities in the US” during 2011. The group found “at least 1,302 heat-related records, 1,090 rainfall records and 549 snowfall records were broken in counties across the nation.”

Check out their “extreme weather mapping tool” for a dramatic summary.