The Way We Live Now: At home. With Ma. And Pa. And the leaky basement pipes, and the laundry machine, and our broken dreams. And the jug we rent from the United Homeless Organization. It's a living, hey! Amirite?

The American Farm Bureau Federation has their own Thanksgiving tradition each year: the advocacy group informally prices out the cost of a traditional Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings, adding up the cost of the turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, rolls with butter, peas, cranberries, vegetables, pumpkin pie and beverages that would be enough to feed 10 people on the holiday. They've been doing this exercise regularly since 1986 and their data spanning from then through 2009 is...

Unemployment for 16-24-year-old black men was 34.5 percent in October, as high as it was during the Great Depression, the Washington Post reports. Young black women face similarly bleak employment numbers: 24.5 percent of them currently do not have j...

Black Friday marks the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season, but retailers still aren’t sure how strong a showing consumers will make. New reports Monday didn’t paint an encouraging...

Consumer Confidence increased slightly for November, up 0.8% from 48.7% in October. Here's the breakdown...

I like Warren Buffett. I even wrote a book about the financial crisis contrasting his principles of prudent finance with recent excessive leverage, bad lending, and malfeasance (Dear Mr. Buffett). Buffett is not a regulator, an altruist, a consumer...

In the article Berkshire + Burlington, I argued that Berkshire's (BRK.A) purchase of Burlington (BNI) was out of character and had little to do with value. It also seems clear that Burlington will raise Berkshire's risk profile. Some people t...

The number of newly laid-off workers seeking unemployment insurance was unchanged last week, remaining above the level that would indicate the economy is adding jobs. Still, new claims – which are considered a gauge of t...

If you're still struggling to find a job in the current economy, you'll be happy to know that this morning President Obama is expected to sign legislation to extend benefits for few more months. The New York Times has more info on how the extension will work, and who qualifies for it.

Ken Houghton notes that playing with data is dangerous. Predicting the future tends to be easy. There are several ways to do it. First, you can predict that everything will grow as it did this...

Fascinating visualization of unemployment in the United States as it progresses over time, from January 2007 to Present. The animation is monthly by counties...

European Central Bank watchers have been buzzing in recent months about Bundesbank President Axel Weber as one of the potential successors to Jean-Claude Trichet in 2011. Bundesbank President...

"We participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret," said Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein. "We apologize." Blankfein had told a British newspaper the other day that Goldman was doing “God’s work”...

Nice infoporn via Mint, showing the breakdown by income level. To put this into context, as of 2007, the median annual household income rose 1.3% to $50,233.00 according to the Census...

There were 3 stock from the earnings list reporting accelerating growth last week. As always, the price is graphed in black, price relative to SPX is blue, and EPS is red. The first is KGS, and...

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. chairman and chief executive Jamie Dimon’s op-ed in the Washington Post Friday, which warns against the populist impulse to break up healthy big banks, illustrates how...

Sources close to God reported Thursday that the Supreme Being was angered at recent comments by Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein that's he's just a banker "doing God's work." Blankfein's comments, God and ot...

Warren Buffett and Bill Gates answered questions from more than 700 cheering Columbia University students gathered in a campus auditorium for a 90-minute CNBC Town Hall event that will air at 9p ET tonight.

To strengthen its own security operations, United Technologies Corp. will be buying General Electric Co.'s security business.

Did someone get tipped off ahead of the HP/3COM deal announced yesterday? Options activity on Wednesday suggests that might be the case. Dow Jones’ Tennille Tracy reports: Just a few hundred contracts on 3Com usually change hands on a daily b...