Labor

A high flying female executive of the British multinational retailer, Marks & Spencer, has been dismissed from her job for allegedly using racist language at work. The Daily Mail reports: Suzanna Broer, 33, was said to have been fired for ‘gross misconduct’ in November, less than a month after she oversaw the launch of the new reward card. It comes after a tough festive period for M&S, with some forecasters predicting the retail giant will report up to a 5.5 per cent drop in like-for-like sales.

Submitted by Harry Debt via EconomyAndMarkets.com,

A Yahoo Finance headline this morning reads: “Unhappy New Year: The U.S. Economy Is Stalling Out.”

We recently learned that existing home sales in November crashed 10.5% from the month before.

Guess when the last time was when we saw these levels? The housing crisis of the mid- to late-2000s!

One year ago, when the brainwashed economist Ph.D intelligentsia was stampeding over each other to come up with the most hyperbolic terms to dub the recovery that would be unleashed on the economy as a result of plunging oil, and gas, prices - with "unambiguously good" being our personal favorite - we would write post after post explaining just how wrong this is, and how in a hyperfinancialized economy, a 2-year record collapse in oil prices is about as "unambiguously bad" as it gets, and not just only for the hundreds of thousands of highly paid energy sector workers who had been

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

In this day and age it seems like almost everything is disposable, and many employers have found that they can make a lot more money if they have a workforce that can be turned on and off like a faucet. In America today, there are more than 17 million “independent workers”, and they represent a bigger share of the workforce than ever before.

Following recent strength on the heels of hope for a new finance minister, news that Ruosseff has sent the minimum-wage-hike Bill to Congress appears to have crushed the hype of any fiscal rectitude and sent Real tumbling. Down over 4% - the most since September 2011 - BRL is back above 4.00 per USD, giving up all the recent gains.

Broad weakness in EMFX...

Seems to have been exacerbated by: