Crash Survival Zone

Enclosed shopping centers, long the cathedrals of American consumerism, are closing their doors by the hundreds as the recession continues to clobber retail sales. Is America’s love affair with the mall over?

Are malls dying?

The vital signs are not good. Even before the recession hit, consumers had developed mall fatigue, and the classic enclosed shopping mall [...]

by Sarah Anderson

Get ready for the boomerang effect. The economic crisis that originated in this country has spread to the farthest corners of the planet. Global poverty is expected to jump by 53 million people and another 51 million workers will join the ranks of the jobless this year.

This is bad news for U.S. workers [...]

Its only two days to go before the G20 summit and after a promising beginning to the preliminary negations the last few days have seen increasingly acrimonious disagreements between several leading participants. The most notable split is between the British and American desire for an increased fiscal stimulus to be applied globally to maximise the [...]

I have been working with freelancers throughout my career and recently, thanks to services like oDesk, I find myself doing it more often.  So you might think that I am happy with what I get, at least in general.  Well, one of the reasons I continue to stay engaged is my high tolerance for pain [...]

The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year, to stem the longest recession since the 1930s.

New pledges from the Fed, the Treasury Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. include $1 trillion for the Public-Private [...]

Kelley Mulfinger thought she would be making a six-figure salary in marketing by her second year out of school. Instead, the University of Virginia alum is teaching a classroom of first-graders how to spell words like “care.”

Mulfinger is one of many recent graduates who are turning to lower paying jobs with the help of national [...]

Home prices sank by the sharpest annual rate on record in January, and the pace continues to accelerate, but there were a handful battered metro areas where price declines slowed, according to data released Tuesday.

The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index of home prices in 20 major cities tumbled by a record 19 percent from January 2008. [...]

US consumer confidence was relatively unchanged in March from an all-time low the previous month amid a weak economy and expectations of more job losses, the Conference Board said Tuesday.
The US research group’s consumer confidence index, based on a representative sample of 5,000 US households, was at 26.0, up from 25.3 in February, when it [...]

Millions of families have taken the hint. With the economy weak and layoffs rising, they are beefing up the household balance sheet by slashing expenses.

“More people are taking action even if layoffs have not struck their family,” said Bruce Bickel, senior vice president of PNC Wealth Management, based in Pittsburgh.

The key to cutting expenses is [...]

The world economy will shrink at a far faster pace than originally expected this year, sending unemployment soaring and highlighting the need for extra steps to halt the crisis, the OECD said on Tuesday.

The 30-nation Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) said member economies would contract -4.3 percent this year. That was sharply down [...]