In the US Christmas retail sales plummeted.
The holiday shopping season was one of the most dismal in years and even the after-Christmas period, when consumers normally rush to stores to use gift cards and seize on big sales, isn’t expected to be enough to save retailers from a terrible year.

No so in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

I wrote a blog entry on how my 2008 predictions fared, and what I think will happen in 2009. Well, wow, I did not expect one of them to happen that quick.
My prediction was that in 2009 Japan was going down. It seems Japan is already going down. The headlines read "Japan November industrial output falls ‘off the cliff’".
Before people panic and say, "OMG this will happen to us", you need to go back into my predictions on why this is a Japanese problem.

I am going to defend the German government.
German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck vilifies Britain’s financial stimulus plan in an interview with American magazine Newsweek, saying that making VAT cuts won’t solve the problem, but rather will build a national debt that will take at least a generation to pay off. The problem? Everyone seems to be against Germany’s solution.
…
Paul Krugman, the recent recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, referred to Steinbrueck as dumb, saying that a refusal to cooperate with debt-financed stimulus packages can cause severe damage.

The question that is being raised is if Rick Wagoner is the best choice to run GM?
My answer, maybe not!

As a Canadian I am totally in awe on how dumb Canadians are acting with respect to the current political crisis. Not ignorant because that would imply you have the capability to learn from your errors.

So I was reading this article on Windows 7. Let me tell you it is not flattering. In fact it is very critical. I for the most part using Windows XP Professional. Though one of my machines is running Vista. I HATE VISTA! What a piece of garbage. I have quite a few points like always wanting to search my harddisk, making things hard to find, having multiple directories identically named though only one can be clicked, etc, etc.

My brother lives in the former Soviet Republics, and I talk to him to see how things are going. I asked, "how are things." He replied, "me I am doing actually pretty well, our company [x] is shutting down for about 3 months."

I have been watching less and less of CNBC. I can barely watch the FastMoney weenies. I try for 10 minutes and get so disgusted that I can only turn it off.
But today I thought I would watch Squawkbox, and Squawk on the Street again. David Faber talked about something that I feel crossed the line. His thing today was, "Hey it might be bad here, but it is worse over there". WTF? David, please tell me the value this provides other than schadenfreude?