great depression
Unloved corporate failure Meg Whitman was last seen insisting that she should be governor of California because goddammit, she paid $141 million to be governor of California. And now the former eBay executive has re-appeared on the public stage, with news that she will be hired to run the ruined tech company Hewlett Packard. The [...]
While the Republicans try to force a default of the American Nation with such tactics as “scholarship grants are for communists,” the Democrats are engaged in an exciting game of catch-up. “Oh,” Obama might say, looking thoughtfully at his hands, “Pell Grants are communist? Well then, I offer a compromise of shutting down Medicare and [...]
Good news for the U.S. job market: The unemployment rate miraculously dropped from 9.8% to 9.4% in December, the biggest one-month drop in the official jobless rate since 1998! Coincidentally, this plunge in the number of Americans desperately seeking work coincides with more Americans dropping out of the labor force entirely, because there aren’t even [...]
Not to spread the funny news too thick today, but have you glanced at the business headlines? The stock markets have not reacted too well to the awful lack-of-employment numbers, with the Dow Jones Index plunging 325 points — that’s three-and-a-quarter percent and well under 10,000 and all the other markets looking similarly terrible. And [...]
After dropping like a stone for the past three or four years, existing home prices in the United States went up a little teeny tiny bit in the second quarter of 2009. HOORAY WE CAN REFINANCE OUR WAY TO HAPPINESS AGAIN! So, the sales price of American houses went up by 2.9% between April Fools [...]
Some math wizards down in Texas have come to an incredible conclusion: What with 6.5 million lost jobs since this Hellcession began, there’s less rush-hour traffic. HEY THAT ALMOST MAKES A CRAZY KIND OF SENSE. But the news isn’t all good.
It’s official for Sad America: As the economy shrunk another 6.1% in the first quarter of 2009, the total GDP loss for this recession (so far!) is 3.3%, making this the worst recession since the legendary “Elvis Downtown” of 1957-58. And there’s only one economic collapse larger than our current horror: the Great Depression of [...]
Not that we should put much faith in what Professional Auditors say, but a terrifying new report predicts that a fourth of America’s remaining publicly-traded companies may be gone by the end of the year. This means 3,600 shareholder-owned businesses are in “going concern” territory, or in serious danger of failure in the next 12 [...]
Friday! Peggy! She has predictions, for you, your dogs, your hair, and especially for your abandoned skyscrapers. Peggy Noonan does not simply sit in her Upper East Side apartment gulping whisky sours while breathlessly watching RedTube clips, her small nervous hands clutching her crucifix, and other things. No! She looks outside, sometimes. She long suspected [...]
