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.
 

The economic downturn is causing most marketers to decrease media spending budgets, and the remaining expenditures are shifting further toward digital, according to a Q2 2009 survey by Round2.
 

Web start-up companies at this year’s Tech Crunch conference face a financial climate that has dried up venture capital, forcing them to turn to friends, family and foundations.
 

Read it and weep…

Scathing and right-on visual commentary on the lotto from Cracked.com — it’s not just a tax on innumeracy, it’s a finely tuned psychological weapon used to exploit cognitive blind-spots and profit from human misery.
The recession has seen a rise in lotto sales as people streamline their financial idiocy from “paying for money [...]

Nothing succeeds like failure, as the saying goes. And nowhere is this dismal truth more evident than in our financial regulatory system, one year after the bankruptcy filing of Lehman Brothers.
 

One year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Americans are still feeling the effects of the credit crisis that roiled the financial system and crashed the stock market. Many are searching for jobs, recalibrating their investments or quietly licking their wounds. In many cases, their story comes down to a number. And, in many cases, [...]

Mollie Bell has a plan the next time a real estate infomercial flashes on her TV: She’s “flipping to the cartoon channel.”
After being burned by a negative-amortization loan that left her owing more on her Compton home than it was worth, Bell, 62, has soured on the home-refinancing craze. Never a big spender anyway, she [...]

Too many people bought too much house for too many years.  Yes, the financial system almost collapsed because mortgage bankers and brokers told lies about loan terms and loosened standards in dangerous ways, and investment bankers packaged those loans into bonds that were far more toxic than ratings agencies predicted.
 

Google chief economist Hal Varian is pretty confident the national economy is recovering, and he’s not just basing that on government data.  He says he can tell from Americans’ search habits.

The message coming from the radio industry is clear: Terrestrial radio is in trouble financially and things will get worse before they get any better. Many of the country’s largest national broadcasters are on the verge of bankruptcy, and the Radio Advertising Bureau (RAB) announced that Q1 2009 was the industry’s worst quarter ever in [...]

Tough figures for this big state!

Out of a job? If you live in the Great State of California, you’re in good company: two out of five working-age Californians do not have a job!
“The current recession stands apart from prior downturns for both the depth and breadth of destruction in the job market,” the report says. [...]