Pension funds for police officers and other public employees have been battered and face a long recovery
The financial crisis has blown a hole in the rosy forecasts of pension funds that cover teachers, police officers and other government employees, casting into doubt as never before whether these public systems will be able to keep their [...]

Nevada is trying to get ahead of California with slogans such as this.
It is supposed to be the United States, but the recession has turned America into 50 competing parts.  As the economy bites, states across America are resorting to dirty tactics to steal business from their neighbours.  At stake are business start-ups and well [...]

After a six-year building frenzy that transformed this city, casino companies are shifting strategies dramatically toward slower growth, paying down debt and cutting back on spending.  Many casino executives don’t expect to break ground on another major building project in Las Vegas for at least 10 years.
 

China contributed 19.2 percent of the world economic growth in 2007, up from 2.3 percent in 1978, a report by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has said.   It said China tops the world in contribution to the global economic growth.
 

International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn is using the IMF’s annual meeting here to campaign for turning the fund into a kind of global central bank with at least $1 trillion for lending developing nations in a crisis.
 

The swift rally in stock markets this year caught everyone’s attention. But with far less fanfare, a frenzy has been taking place in the market for corporate bonds.  When credit markets practically shut down last year, businesses had to pay huge premiums to raise money from investors, offering returns of 10 to 20 percent to [...]

Colorado Inventor Showcase
Common misconceptions can cause the best ideas to fall flat – The economic downturn has forced us to rethink our lives. For many, this means a time of stepping into the workshop to give shape to ideas that have been waiting for the right opportunity to emerge.

Nearly 1 million homes nationwide are in the process of foreclosure, according to a report Wednesday from the U.S. Department of the Treasury covering banks and loan servicers that make up 64 percent of all outstanding mortgages.  As of June 30, there were 992,554 homes in the process of foreclosure, up 15.3 percent from March [...]

Web surfers in the U.S. are spending about three times as much of their online time on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and blog sites as they did a year ago, according to a new report from The Nielsen Co.
 

 
Job seekers queue up to attend a job fair  in Chicago.
Despite signs that the economy has resumed growing, unemployed Americans now confront a job market that is bleaker than ever in the current recession, and employment prospects are still getting worse.  Job seekers now outnumber openings six to one, the worst ratio since the government [...]

 
Grandparents are stepping up, and the American family may never be the same.  A few years ago, a key microtrend was the Working Retired — aging Americans who were so enjoying work and health that they either wouldn’t retire or were starting second careers altogether. One incidental effect was that grandparents weren’t around to help [...]

Pop quiz: Worldwide, what’s the fastest growing primary fuel on a per capita basis?  It should come as no surprise to hear the answer is coal. Cheap and scalable, the ubiquitous black stuff is the first menu choice of nearly all industrializing economies with a growing energy appetite. That was easy; how about the second [...]

Women have been earning the most college degrees
What started as a “man-cession” is turning into a “Great He-pression.”  The unemployment rate for men is running 2.7 percentage points higher than for women — a “just unprecedented” spread, according to economist Mark Perry at the University of Michigan at Flint.

Cash-strapped Europeans are travelling to Britain to go bankrupt – then returning home debt-free. “Bankruptcy tourism” is becoming so popular that a company is now helping insolvent Europeans to travel and live temporarily in the UK.
Lenient laws mean that foreigners can live in Britain, file for bankruptcy and leave with the slate wiped clean after [...]

“We’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore”
7-Eleven Inc. said Thursday that its franchisees and store operators have collected 1.6 million signatures nationwide in its petition drive against what it calls unfair credit card fees.
The Dallas-based convenience store chain held the signature drive from June 22 through Aug. 10 at store counters [...]

U.S. airlines are raking in more money this year from extra fees, although fewer people are flying.In the first six months of this year, the airlines collected $3.8 billion for checking bags, canceling or rebooking flights, carrying pets and assigning seats, the latest data from the Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics show. That’s [...]

Right now, the transportation systems that support the economy appear to be highly efficient.  To the casual observer, whenever a company needs to move its goods around the country or around the globe, it can do so fairly cheaply and easily.  
 

Yaskawa Electric’s industrial robots in Tokyo, victims of the global recession.
Play a small violin for thousands of Japanese industrial robots which now stand silent, victims of the global economic downturn in a country that hosts the highest robot-to-human ratio.  Recession times have proved a harsh reality check for Japan’s ongoing love affair with robots. Novelty [...]

A Seiyu outlet in Akabane, part of Wal-Mart Stores.
Not long ago, many Japanese bought so many $100 melons and $1,000 handbags that this was the only country in the world where luxury products were considered mass market.  Even through the economic stagnation of Japan’s so-called lost decade, which began in the early 1990s, Japanese consumers [...]

A smaller share of Americans married, drove to work alone, owned their own home or moved to a new residence last year than the year before.  More lived in overcrowded housing. Property values declined. And fewer immigrants arrived, which meant that for the first time since the beginning of the decade, the total number of [...]

Hot money going out, even hotter coming back in
In September 2008, China witnessed a massive exodus of hot money due to the global financial crisis. However, with the Chinese economy showing signs of improvement in the second quarter of 2009, the situation reversed with a rush of hot money returning to China.
In late June 2009, [...]

 
The Great Recession is pushing many highly educated women who had left work to stay at home with their children to dive back into the labor pool, according to several nationally recognized experts on women in the workplace.  Many of these women are sending out job applications for the first time in years because their [...]

More skilled immigrants are giving up their American dreams to pursue careers back home, raising concerns that the U.S. may lose its competitive edge in science, technology and other fields.
 

Texting for Economic Improvement?

British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling could take a tip from his counterparts in the Philippines as he searches for money-saving ideas this weekend: a tax on text messages.
The parliament in Manila is planning to implement an excise tax on text messages in a desperate attempt to narrow the country’s budget [...]

Premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance rose to an average of $13,375 annually for family coverage this year, with employees on average paying $3,515 and employers paying $9,860, according to a new survey.