All of your aspirational yuppie mall brands like Pottery Barn and Williams Sonoma and Coach (which used to be legitimately fancy, years ago, before they decided to start selling loudly branded handbags to Bethesdan tweens) are having to lower prices permanently because nobody has money anymore and they don’t want to get people used to insane 75% off sales all the time. MORE »

NO JOBS LEFT TO LOSE: New jobless claims fell this week, hooray, due to the number of jobs in the US forming an asymptote with zero. Continuing jobless claims, meanwhile, are just staggering and awful, a wretched 5.47 million and counting. Start growing your Victory Gardens now, because otherwise you might not have food next winter. [MSNBC]

By the Comics Curmudgeon
Once every a generation or so, it’s important that our comfortable lives are shaken up, so that we can take stock and figure out what’s really important. Sure, economic disruptions are painful, but they can also herald a return to self-reliance and old-fashioned, time-tested values. Unfortunately, our current economic crisis passed that point weeks ago, so now you’re sort of just rubbing it in, Cold Dead Hand of Adam Smith. We promise to stop with the credit cards and the adjustable rate mortgages, OK? Just give us our fucking 401Ks back. Sadly, it appears that our political leaders will be forced to take truly drastic steps to stop our planet from being transformed into a vast hobo jungle. MORE »

Just the other day we were wondering, “What areas of the job market flourish in depressions?” and the answers were, “Repossessions, Netflix, economic analysis, and state unemployment offices, of course,” but it turned out that unemployment offices are all closing. Still, it seemed plausible that economists might have a pretty good lock on a job for a while, as there is no shortage of economic information these days, and who is going to mull that shit over for the masses, bloggers? But no, economists can’t get jobs any more, either, because all of the universities that hire them are going broke. [Wall Street Journal]

Congratulations to the 35,000 doomed people who filed new unemployment claims last week — thanks to you unlucky folks, January job losses hit 626,000, the highest unemployment numbers since the Ronald Reagan Recession/Depression of 1982. That was a fun catastrophe. Why doesn’t anyone ever talk about Reagan’s Depression? MORE »

• UGH: “DETROIT — Chrysler says it will close all 30 of its manufacturing plants for a month starting Friday.” It’ll be like a vacation for auto workers, except they won’t travel anywhere and will enter poverty. We just couldn’t afford that $14 billion loan! [AP]

This is always the problem with furries: they talk a good game, and that’s about it. Even during the recession. [SF Chronicle]

Here’s heavy-petting Saxby Chambliss defending himself, on the Fox News, against a Jim Martin ad that quotes Chambliss saying he doesn’t even know what the term “recession” means. We’ll cut him some slack on that, because a new person is declaring a new version of the word everyday. But what’s notable is that Chambliss defends his comment by saying that he was quoting Alan Greenspan, people. He appears still to think that this is the ’90s/early ’00s, when name-dropping Greenspan worked as a blanket defense against criticism or, more importantly, an excuse not to learn anything about economics. This caused several problems. [YouTube]

It seems like just yesterday our little recession spent all its time wailing for food and pooping its pants, but it’s already pretty big! Soon it will be all growns up and cooking meth in the back yard shed while it asks us for “rent money.” The National Bureau of Economic Research says our recession is one year old, in the sense that the employment situation was at its very awesomest one year ago. Since then we have all lost our jobs and begun eating melamine-tainted cat food for sustenance. [MarketWatch]

Peggington. We love Peggington so much, and we don’t even care who knows! In this week’s very special Thanksgiving edition of her Wall Street Journal psychodiary, “Declarations,” the Noonanism — an embarrassingly insular worldview in which no personal anecdote is void of world-historical spiritual import — has been cranked deep into the red. Here’s what Peggy’s thankful for this weekend: that the mysterious Negro president has been such a delight so far; that she doesn’t have to see poor people on the street; and that God safely carries her around on airplanes when she needs to travel. We will focus on the second and the third. MORE »

Holy Jesus God do you know how bad this recession is? So bad that one of the most recession-proof industries ever invented, THE WEATHER, has now hit upon hard times. The Weather Channel is laying off some untold number of staff, probably millions, more than the whole auto worker’s industry plus Wall Street combined, because there is no weather anywhere anymore. There’s just no budget for it. [Atlanta Journal-Constitution]