Inquiring minds are interested in figuring out how long it might take to get back to "full employment" defined as 5%.John Mauldin touched upon this theme in Unemployment: Welcome to the New Normal.Mauldin's analysis stopped short of making actual projections as to when full employment would return or the detailed path it would take to get there year by year. However I thank him for providing a nice starting point for discussion.In Scarred Job Market Expected to Weigh on Economy the Wall Street Journal offers this look at how long it would take to return to employment levels before ...

The United States long an exporter of popular culture may be exporting obesity to Europe Asia and Africa thanks to strong fast-food sales led by McDonald’s (MCD).The World Health Organization says about one billion people worldwide are now obese. Since 1980 the number of obese Europeans has tripled. By some estimates about half the population of the United Kingdom is overweight or obese.“The medical community is dumbfounded by the problem ” Dr. Bernadine Healy wrote recently in US News & World Report. “Across the developing world too obesity has become a major affliction as people move out of poverty.”Traditionally ...

Is a 30-second commercial that runs during the Super Bowl really worth $3 million? Hell yes say the companies that lined up to buy spots during the NBC-hosted game in 2009. The network's line-up sold out for the Superbowl broadcast which ended up being the highest-rated in history and the second most-watched program in US history. The game had an average of 98.7 million viewers beating out the 2008 Super Bowl’s average of 97.5 million. In total 151.6 million people watched at least a part of the game according to Nielsen.“The Super Bowl has done an incredible job of ...

Avian influenza (H5N1) sometimes known as bird flu is a highly contagious animal disease caused by viruses that infect birds and less commonly pigs. On rare occasions it has crossed over to humans. There have been 442 human cases and 262 deaths since 1997 in 15 countries (although dozens more have had exclusively poultry outbreaks) according to the WHO; most came into direct contact with infected poultry. As with swine flu which didn't come from eating pigs none of the cases of Avian flu resulted from eating poultry. Photo by Andrew Ross/AFP/Getty Images In humans in those rare cases ...

I've been talking about the Job-Loss Recovery for quite some time. (Click here to see recent examples of my discussion and check out Professor Megan Barnett's explanation in The Decoder: Jobless Recovery.)Of course it's no mystery why job growth has slowed and here are 12 reasons it has:1. We consumed more than we produced for a decade. Consumers are deep in debt and need to take care of their balance sheets.2. We built enough houses for 15 years in a five-year window.3. People thought home prices would rise forever and borrowed against their homes. They're now under water and ...

Taco Bell Feeding Bands Free Fourthmeal While Out on the Road