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Former retail titan JCPenney (JCP) is in trouble. The 1,100 store mall staple is in the middle of a radical redesign under CEO Ron Johnson, who led the roll-out of Apple's wildly successful retail locations prior to coming to JCP. In an investor presentation at the beginning of 2012, Johnson promised to do nothing short of re-invent the department store concept. But it hasn't worked out that way. JCP stock is down more than 40% in 2012, sales are collapsing, and employee enthusiasm has deteriorated to the point that the company was forced to announce in an SEC filing that...

What Does It Mean To “Prepare For The Economic Collapse”? Daisy Luther December 24th, 2012 The Organic PrepperLast week I wrote an article in response to the media’s vilification of preppers in the aftermath of the horrible tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut. The article was quoted in an article on Yahoo.com, to my great astonishment, and that is when I saw how little most people understand about prepping. You can see in most of the 4492 comments the article received that many folks just don’t “get it”. My inbox was filled with a barrage of hate mail and a number of...

U.S. shoppers spent cautiously this holiday season, a disappointment for retailers who slashed prices to lure people into stores and now must hope for a post-Christmas burst of spending. Sales of electronics, clothing, jewelry and home goods in the two months before Christmas increased 0.7 percent compared with last year, according to the MasterCard Advisors SpendingPulse report. That was below the healthy 3 to 4 percent growth that analysts had expected...

HUSSMAN: Investors Don't Realize How Quickly All Of Their Recent Profits Could Get Destroyed Joe WeisenthalDec. 24, 2012, 7:05 AM In his latest weekly note, John Hussman is very bearish and he blasts the Fed for not correctly fixing the economy. This is very standard for him. One interesting observation regards the fragility of investor gains: The stock market is only a few percent from its 6-month high at present, and even an overextended move to about 1490 would put the S&P 500 at its upper Bollinger band (two standard deviations above the 20-period moving average) on daily, weekly and...

KRUGMAN: Erskine Bowles, Alan Greenspan, And The WSJ Editorial Board Are All Basically Members Of A Doomsday Cult Joe WeisenthalDec. 24, 2012, 5:55 AM We liked this note that was sent out by SocGen's Kit Juckes this morning: It wouldn't be Christmas without Paul Krugman telling the US government it's OK to spend money. Krugman thinks that anyone who worries about a disaster coming from the scale of US debt is a doom-mongerer. Especially the WSJ. That's snarky, but that is what Krugman's Christmas eve column is about. Essentially it's a reminder of one of his favorite topics: That the...

We have a new era dawning in Global Monetary policy. It is a new day with the monetary skies already red. Within 90 days the captains of monetary policy have steered the world into uncharted waters and on a course that history warns us against. Federal Reserve: QE3 "Unlimited" and QE4 within 90 days, ECB: OMT "Uncapped", BoJ: QE 10 and the newly elected Prime Minister Abe's mandate for "Inflation at any cost" BoE: UK's newly appointed BoE Governor, Mark Carney's Monetary Evan Rule targeting. These untested and newly commissioned captains all have PhD's from the finest Economic schools in...

Early in his first term, Barack Obama raised a lot of eyebrows by his (now-infamous) action of returning to the British a bust of Winston Churchill. This error was compounded by giving as a gift to the British Prime minister a gift of DVDs of classic American movies, in a format incompatible with British DVD players. A lot of time was spent either rationalizing this behaviour away, or analyzing it, but the consensus, after a time, was Officially DeclaredTM to be a mixture of "SQUIRREL!" and "Anti-Imperialist" together with references to the Brit treatment of the Mau-Maus in Africa, hints...

KALAMAZOO, MI – It may be time to put away those rocking chairs and list the golf clubs on eBay. Whether driven by economic necessity or a desire to remain engaged, more people are punching clocks well past their 65th birthday. In 2012, one in nine men over age 75 was working, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and one in 20 women over 75 were employed. That was the highest number recorded since the government started keeping those statistics in 1981. "I do think that a lot of people who are approaching later in life these days...

A global activist group is targeting two large hotel chains because they give discounts to members of the National Rifle Association. The organization is putting pressure on the hotel chains to force them to disassociate from the gun-rights group after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. The group, Avaaz, described as a "a global campaign network of 17 million people" is pressuring "Wyndham Hotels Worldwide – which owns Ramada, Days Inn, Wingate and Super 8 – and Best Western" because both organizations are listed as "friends of the NRA" on the NRA's website. Joseph Huff-Hannon, a senior campaigner at Avaaz,...

Hiring is expected to pick up in the New Year, according to career counselors, but uncertainty surrounding the strength of the economy will likely prevent the hiring season from being as robust as in years past. Last month, the economy added 146,000 jobs, well beyond the expected 85,000 experts predicted. And a strong holiday shopping season is buoying hopes that December will beat expectations as well. "Historically, the first quarter of any fiscal year is always the best time to expect hires because of the normal cycle of business," says Robert Meier, president of Job Market Experts, a Florida-based firm...

Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines, Inc., (NYSE; DAL) received 22,000 applications for about 300 flight attendant jobs after posting the positions outside the company last week. Reuters reports that Chief Executive Officer Richard Anderson told workers in a weekly recorded message that applications arrived at a rate of two per minute. “We are experiencing a phenomenal response to the job posting,” Anderson said. Applicants will be interviewed in January. New employees will begin flying in June in time for the company’s peak travel season...

75 Economic Numbers From 2012 That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe By Michael Snyder December 20th, 2012 What a year 2012 has been! The mainstream media continues to tell us what a "great job" the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve are doing of managing the economy, but meanwhile things just continue to get even worse for the poor and the middle class. It is imperative that we educate the American people about the true condition of our economy and about why all of this is happening. If nothing is done, our debt problems will continue to get worse,...

The Most Accurate Economist On Wall Street Sees A Big Bullish Wildcard For America Sam RoDec. 21, 2012, 2:05 PM One of the most bullish economic stories in the world has been the recent recovery of the U.S. housing market. Maury Harris, UBS's Chief U.S. Economist, is particularly optimistic considering the snapback of housing formation, which is now back above 1 million per year. We recently had lunch with Harris, who is repeatedly recognized as the most accurate economist on Wall Street and is one of Bloomberg's 50 most influential people in the world. Harris pointed to one housing market...

While much of the nation is still struggling to emerge from a historic housing-market meltdown, the District is reliving its boom days. High rents, low interest rates, low inventory, and a flood of new residents in their 20s and 30s are making parts of the city feel like it’s 2005 again. The median home sale price in the District is up 14 percent from last year, according to RealEstate Business Intelligence (RBI). And the average number of days houses spend on the market has fallen by nearly 30 percent, to 53 days.

The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits rose last week by 17,000, reversing four weeks of declines.

The Coming China Economic Crisis Economics / China EconomyDec 20, 2012 - 04:43 AM By: Clif Droke When Bert Dohmen talks, smart investors listen. In 2007 when most investment analysts and economists were downplaying the developing credit market troubles, Bert warned investors that the probability was very high that the troubles would escalate into full-blown crisis and would produce a crash of historic proportions. He chronicled the developing credit crisis in the pages of his newsletter and also published a book in early 2012 entitled, The Coming China Crisis, which provided his insightful views on the emerging crisis in depth....

Down And Out In California By Douglas French 12/20/12 Gas in Vegas is a dollar cheaper a gallon than in the Golden State, or so a friend and recent LA transplant tells me. He went on to say the top tax rate in California is over 13%, while, of course, Nevada has no state income tax. Over dinner at Del Frisco’s, he explained how industries are being ruined by runaway government in his old home state. Nevada would surely benefit from businesses making their escape. Plenty of people are leaving California — nearly 700,000, I read somewhere — however, my...

I’m going to lay out everything you need to know about the fiscal cliff negotiations. After reading this, you can ignore all of the media’s coverage of this topic as well as various politicians’ announcements pertaining to this subject. All you need to know consists of just one sentence. Politicians are in charge of this issue.These are the same folks who haven’t even produced a budget in four years. The same folks who have run $1+ trillion deficits for four years. The same folks who rarely if ever leave office as a result of their fiscal mistakes. In simple terms,...

JIM ROGERS: I'm A Gold Bull, But I Think Prices Will Tumble For A While Longer Rajeshni Naidu-Ghelani, CNBCDecember 20, 2012With gold prices being hammered in recent weeks, and trading near four-month lows on Wednesday, longtime gold bull Jim Rogers is sounding a word of caution, saying it's possible the correction in bullion may continue into the new year. "Just be careful, there're too many bulls, including me, but I'm very cautious," Rogers told CNBC. "Gold is having a correction— it's been correcting for 15-16 months now— which is normal in my view, and it's possible that [the] correction is...

GDP SOARS PAST EXPECTATIONS, RISING 3.1 PERCENT Matthew BoeslerDecember 20, 2012 U.S. economic output rose 3.1 percent in Q3 versus consensus estimates of a 2.8 percent gain. An increase in nonfarm private inventories was one of the largest single drivers of growth, contributing 1.1 percentage points to the number. Personal consumption growth came in at 1.6 percent versus expectations of a 1.4 percent rise. Below, the full text from the BEA: Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States -- increased at an annual rate of 3.1...