“ECONOMY” GROWS AT HILARIOUS PACE: Ha ha ha GDP grew 5.7% during the last quarter of 2009, just like in the good old days, when people had jobs. How healthy does this economy sound: the major reason for growth was that “businesses reduced inventories less aggressively.” Stupid move, businesses. It’s not like anyone’s going to buy your shit. [Reuters]

Oh ho ho ho, all those Teabaggers with their “Where’s MY bailout?” signs will have to climb out of their microtards and STFU because President Obama is going to save Main Street, finally, now that Main Street has foolishly elected a naked Republican with clamshelled daughters because everyone is so distressed with Wall Street. So: how will President Obama “help the middle class”? TAXCUTSTAXCUTSTAXCUTS. MORE »

Yay here is your Friday News Roundup of somebody else’s News Roundup regarding Tim Geithner and Larry Summers getting beaten up by greybeards Joe Biden and Paul Volcker! Biden and Volcker are, combined, 150 years old and 150 feet tall; also they are liberal hippies. MORE »

HAPPY FRIDAY! “A far more disturbing number (in Table A-1 of today’s BLS release) shows that ‘persons not in the labor force’ increased by about 840,000 between November and December, from 83,022,000 to 83,865,000. That’s seasonally-adjusted; unadjusted, the number is closer to a million… What happened to the million Americans who went missing from the BLS definition of the labor force in the single month of December? They are the ‘long-term discouraged’ or whatever, those whose prospects of finding a job are so poor that they have stopped looking.” [Asia Times via Clusterstock]

People with nothing better to do on New Year’s Eve love watching Dick Clark propped up in Times Square as a giant crystal ball full of even more crystal (but not meth!) is slowly lowered from … some kind of pulley, we figure? We only watched this once, when we were about nine years old, and our assumption was, obviously, that the “fucking thing had broken, on New Year’s Eve of all fucking nights,” but then Grandpa said that’s how it’s supposed to work, and then everybody started weeping in the night. ANYWAY: The company who makes the annual New Year’s Rockin’ Eve crystal shards has gone bankrupt, in 2009, yay Waterford Crystal! [True/Slant]

It is just that kind of news day, apparently! Anyway no one worry about the economy anymore. [YouTube]

Oh goody,the new Xmas Survey from Grandparents.com (?) has arrived in the Email: “Santa’s sleigh is going to be a lot lighter this year, according to a new survey by Grandparents.com. Forty-three percent of parents and grandparents surveyed will buy fewer gifts than they have in the past, and a whopping 90 percent plan to confine their shopping to discount stores like Wal-Mart, Kmart, and Target.” Avoid the crowds, shop only at Macy’s and the Apple Store!

• OH LOOK, A BOOK REVIEW, BY YOUR EDITOR: “According to Kurt Andersen’s slim new book Reset, the economic collapse is a magical second chance for America — an opportunity for a nation of greedy vulgarians and fat slobs to find new purpose in our post-binge society.” [Las Vegas Weekly]

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 Day and the end of June, but they also dropped by 15% as compared to a year earlier. Never mind, we’re still doomed. [Washington Post]

Poor Rhode Island is a wee state with a huge unemployment problem, horrible taxes, and an abysmally high cost of living. Fortunately, it’s also got a governor with a can-do attitude who sees one very obvious way to dig the state out of its current budget mess: just get state workers to take two and a half weeks off, unpaid, over the next year or so. MORE »

Have you ever had a holiday vacation on Martha’s Vineyard? So boring! Once you get over the “Ah and there’s where Ted Kennedy crashed his car and drowned that lady” historical thing — sorry, Denby! — you realize it’s just a place full of crappy tourist shops and terrible humid boiling weather and a bunch of ugly gated beach mansions surrounded by swamps, bogs and discarded “lobster rolls.” How to jazz it up? Barack Obama decided to go on the teevee to announce what everybody already knew he was doing: giving Ben Bernanke another term. MORE »

IT’S LIKE A RECOVERY, BUT WITH NO EQUITY, SAVINGS, CONSUMER SPENDING, JOBS, RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS, INNOVATION, STRONG CURRENCY, AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE, BASIC SHELTER, OR LONG-TERM PROSPECTS FOR A COMPETITIVE MODERN ECONOMY: “The housing market continues to threaten signs of an economic recovery, with new data released on Thursday showing an all-time high of Americans falling behind on loan payments and the rate of home foreclosures unlikely to peak until late in 2010.” But the stock markets are up! Everyone in America owns bundles of good stocks, right? Right?? [The Hill]

Remember all that talk about how the unemployment rate fell by .1 percent last month and this proved, definitively, that happy days were here again? Remember all the sailors kissing ladies in the streets, and the wonderful ticker-tape parades? Well, everything has gone back to being terrible, according to New Statistics. MORE »

• U.S. WORKER PRODUCTIVITY HITS SIX-YEAR HIGH: Probably because everyone’s scared to death of losing their jobs, American productivity is at the highest rate since 2003. [Marketwatch]