newVideoPlayer("/dailyshowBF_gizmodo.flv", 506, 404,""); If you didn't watch Jon Stewart yesterday, check out his hilarious take on Black Friday, recession, and people's stupidity fighting for silly...

pscript type="text/javascript" newVideoPlayer("/dailyshowBF_gizmodo.flv", 506, 404,""); /scriptimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/stills/dailyshowBF_gizmodo.flv.jpg" style="display:block;display: none;" /If you didn't watch Jon Stewart yesterday, check out his hilarious take on Black Friday, recession, and people's stupidity fighting for silly things. His purchases: a wobble-headed C-3PO doll and, get ready, the a href="http://gizmodo.com/335673/sorting-the-5195-pieces-of-the-millennium-falcon-gives-strange-pleasure-back-pain"Lego Millennium Falcon*/a./p p* Don't you dare ask a href="http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/lego-millennium-falcon,-the-video-teaser/the-construction-of-the-lego-millennium-falcon-part-i-the-unboxing-and-the-licking-335036.php"about ithat/i/a again./p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=camp;i=3669d7e2335d147831522d2ce0cbd029amp;p=1"img style="border:0;" src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=vamp;i=3669d7e2335d147831522d2ce0cbd029amp;p=1" border="0" //adiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=tKStjiQG"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=8eTl4bB4"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=tM3NpfcA"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=tM3NpfcA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=6gBH02Uz"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=6gBH02Uz" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/089O9z34gKY" height="1" width="1"/

Australia's economic growth slowed to 0.1 percent in the third quarter of 2008, its slowest rate in nearly a decade, according to government figures released Wednesday.

The number of people out of work in Spain is poised to surpass 3m amid a deepening recession caused by the collapse of the country's housing market and the global...

Italian industry has slashed its electricity consumption by almost a third in two months in a stark sign of the force of the recession and a serious blow to efforts by...

Ramu Yalamanchi, CEO of Hi5 isn't worried about the recession. "We started in a recession so we know what to do. Plus, recessions make available some great resources."

Hi5, headquartered in San Francisco, is much better known outside of the region, and the US. It is larger than MySpace or Facebook, in 30 countries especially Spanish-speaking such as Mexico, and in developing countries--and it is growing faster than both.

"When we started in 2003, we saw that the US market was getting crowded so we looked at emerging markets, that's how we got popular outside of the US," says Mr Yalamanchi.

Hi5 has great momentum and it is looking for new markets. It thinks that virtual worlds is a potentially large opportunity. Earlier this year Hi5 acquired Pixverse, a small company that makes virtual products for virtual worlds. Gaia Online, for example, makes a lot of money from its virtual world economy.

"Our users like to express themselves creatively and we think that virtual worlds will allow them to do more of that. Also, mobile is very important for us, because in a lot of countries people have mobile phones but they don't have PCs."

Hi5 hopes that virtual worlds and mobile will help it continue growing at a very fast pace. In the first six months of this year comScore reported Hi5 visitors increased 79 per cent to 56.4 million per month from 31.4 million per month.

And although Hi5 is big elsewhere, it is not giving up on the US, it hopes to capitalize on its large Spanish speaking user base. "We think we can do very well among Hispanic users in the US," says Mr Yalamanchi.

Hi5 has also cultivated the application developer community by being a big supporter of the OpenSocial standard. This helps developers easily port their applications across different social network platforms.

Hi5 is a privately held company and has about $20m in cash. Mr Yalamanchi notes that economic downturns make resources less expensive such as office space, and also make it easier to find great software engineers, which will help Hi5 in this next phase of its expansion.

Foremski's Take:

Monetization of social networks continues to be a challenge for all social networks because the environment is different to search advertising. It is especially challenging for Hi5 because of its diverse geographic spread. Advertisers continue buy space on a regional basis rather than on a global scale and that won't change for a good while.

Also, ads on social networks are considered very low quality and they don't have the same conversion rates as on other sites. However, that means that there is an excellent arbitrage opportunity for those advertising agencies that can craft the right type of commercial message. Hi5 is working with various agencies to create interactive ads that engage users. And Hi5 has done well with partners in various local markets.

Hi5 is well positioned for growth. We are still in the early stages of social networks, and this is even truer in developing countries where many people are getting online for the first time, and that's where Hi5 has brand leadership. On the Internet being number 1 means being far ahead of number two, or three, and that's a great advantage for Hi5. Especially in markets that are growing far faster than the US.

Recessions might slow spending, but they don't slow Moore's Law, which means the Internet becomes more accessible every day to millions more people overseas, and that's where Hi5 is strong.

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/57706?ns=guardianpageName=Politics%3A+Mandelson+calls+for+%27industrial+activism%27+to+revitalise+Britain+after+the+recessionch=Politicsc3=The+Guardianc4=Economic+policy%2CPeter+Mandelson%2CRecession+%28UK%29%2CCredit+crunch+%28Business%29%2CPolitics%2CBusiness%2CUK+newsc5=Credit+Crunch%2CBusiness+Markets%2CNot+commercially+useful%2CUnclassifed+Contributorsc6=Allegra+Strattonc7=2008_12_03c8=1127786c9=articlec10=GUc11=Politicsc12=Economic+policyc13=c14=h2=GU%2FPolitics%2FEconomic+policy" width="1" height="1" //divpThe business secretary, Peter Mandelson, will set out plans for a new age of "industrial activism" when he gives the annual Hugo Young memorial lecture today, saying the government must do more to support services and manufacturing for after the recession, when the country will be "an even tougher place to do business in". /ppIn the Guardian lecture, Mandelson will take a break from his department's current preoccupation with getting the banks to resume lending to paint a picture of Britain on "the other side" of the recession. He will say: "We will get through the downturn. But on the other side we will encounter an even tougher place to do business in and we need to be fully prepared."/ppMandelson will sketch out a new doctrine of "market-driven industrial activism" to ready the economy. Aides describe this as a model that would see the government, in partnership with the private sector, driving what they call "available streams of the economy" to support growth sectors. Low-carbon technology, civil nuclear plans and high-tech manufacturing are all likely to be boosted./ppToday's speech will build on a defence of Britain's manufacturing base the business secretary mounted last week at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), in which he said he "hated" Britain being described as a "post-industrial economy" since the UK was the sixth-largest manufacturer by output. Though the future for the country may not lie with "mills and smokestacks", he told the CBI, it lay with the "next industrial revolution and the low-carbon and post-carbon technologies that will define the 21st century."/ppAccording to the Purchasing Managers Index published on Monday, British manufacturing shrank in November at the fastest rate since records began in 1992, making it the third month in a row to see a record decline. In October the CBI said optimism among British manufacturers was at its lowest level for three decades./ppToday Mandelson will defend the government against claims its industrial policies were becoming overly statist, something critics say repudiates the modernisation platform on which Labour was elected in 1997./ppHe will say: "For New Labour this is a critical moment to renew and think further about how Britain adapts to globalisation and the tougher economic challenge we are facing. Not to retreat from the strong and abiding commitment to open economies and free markets that New Labour made in 1994. Certainly not to be hubristic that big government is back: I don't believe it is or should be. But to define urgently what smart government can do to resolve not just the present crisis but to guarantee Britain's future prosperity."/ppMandelson will also acknowledge the government's attempts to steer business through the recession may have frustrated some. He will say: "While the government is doing a lot to back enterprise and support entrepreneurs, some of its efforts appear to business as insufficiently joined up and often overlapping."/ppLast night a business department spokesman said rights to flexible working would be going ahead. The business secretary caused controversy only three weeks into his job when he announced a review of the rights, on account of businesses fearing they would be unable to afford it during a downturn. Yesterday an aide said the review had wrapped up and they were "happy for it to go ahead"./ppIt will not be included in the Queen's speech tomorrow since it does not require primary legislation./pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/economy"Economic policy/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/peter-mandelson"Peter Mandelson/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/recession"Recession/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/creditcrunch"Credit crunch/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/bCmfVGe8FzssvcdHAwTkVj3WwDo/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/bCmfVGe8FzssvcdHAwTkVj3WwDo/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/30491?ns=guardianpageName=Comment+is+free%3A+In+this+recession%2C+we+want+comfort+culture+to+go+with+our+comfort+foodch=Comment+is+freec3=The+Guardianc4=Recession+%28UK%29%2CEconomic+growth+and+recession+US%2CCredit+crunch+%28Business%29%2CTesco+%28Business%29%2CSupermarkets+%28business%29%2CRetail+industry+%28Business%29%2CFilm%2CStage%2CCulture+section%2CBusinessc5=Credit+Crunch%2CNot+commercially+useful%2CBusiness+Markets%2CTheatrec6=Jonathan+Freedlandc7=2008_12_03c8=1127725c9=articlec10=GUc11=Comment+is+freec12=blogc13=c14=Comment+is+freeh2=GU%2FComment+is+free%2Fblog%2FComment+is+free" width="1" height="1" //divpMan cannot live by bread alone - he also needs some shepherd's pie and a dollop of rice pudding. That, at least, is the word from Tesco, reporting an extraordinary surge in sales of comfort food. As we feel the first chill of the recession, and as American economists declare that the downturn in the United States began a full year ago, making the current slump already longer than the average recession since the second world war, the supermarket chain has noticed a run on its cosiest products./ppSales of lamb hotpot are up 615% on this time last year, while beef casserole and dumplings have leapt by 279%. Deep-filled pies are selling at more than double the usual rate, as is cheesecake. Hot cakes are selling like hot cakes. /ppCould that be down to the wintry weather rather than the frozen economy? No. Tesco saw the boom in reassuring ready meals and cosy grub during the period from May to October. This isn't about staying warm, says the store, along with other retailers who've noticed a similar pattern on their shelves. It's about Britons cheering themselves up, padding their tummies as they tighten their belts. And notice the dishes in demand: traditional British fare, as if we're fleeing scary global economic forces, seeking refuge in the familiar smells of mum's kitchen and school dinners./ppSo much for what we're putting into our stomachs as the economy plunges downward, with most forecasters expecting the thud to come once the fleeting lift of Christmas is over. What will happen to our other appetites, those located not in our mouths but between our ears? What is the brainfood we'll be seeking out as times get tougher? Put simply, what's likely to be the culture of this recession?/ppNot so different from the food, as it happens. While Waitrose reports an 80% increase in sales of loaf cakes, ITV is cheering a rise in the television equivalent: viewing figures for I'm A Celebrity are up on last year. The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing are doing a roaring trade too. And what has just become Britain's fastest-ever selling DVD? Mamma Mia!./ppThink of it as comfort culture to accompany the comfort food. We want to be eased through the freeze, and Ant and Dec can be relied on to do that just as effectively as a slice of steak and kidney pie./ppOf course, this habit has a long history. Cinema audiences developed the desire to be transported into mindless escapism, watching Busby Berkeley's synchronised swimmers make pretty shapes in the depths of the Great Depression. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made their top-hatted and ballgowned debut in 1933, the same year unemployment in the US hit 25%. If today's audiences are blocking out all thoughts of the credit crunch in favour of watching Meryl Streep play the Dancing Queen on a sun-kissed Greek island where the skies are permanently blue, they are doing no more than honouring a tradition started by their grandparents. /ppBut it's not all mindless. Brucie and Cheryl Cole are far from the only cultural providers experiencing a boom during the bust. In a declining newspaper market, the Financial Times and the Guardian both saw their sales rise as the financial crisis hit. (The number crunchers on the Guardian's website have seen big increases - led by serious news, with massive leaps in interest in business stories.) Richard Reeves, director of the thinktank Demos, says he has spotted three different people reading JK Galbraith's The Great Crash on his morning train to work. "People want more entertainment," he says, "but they also want more enlightenment."/ppIt seems we either want to escape the current turmoil or understand it. The latter might not always mean digesting dense economic tracts. Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the National Theatre, has noticed the spectacular response the musical Billy Elliot has just received on Broadway. A tale of declining industry, hardship and the threat of joblessness, "It acknowledges pain, individual achievement in overcoming that pain and collective solidarity in the face of it," Hytner told me yesterday, suggesting that Billy Elliot had come at just the right moment for New York theatregoers. He has no plans to stage either a feelgood musical at the National - there will be no "sugar rush of escapism" - or an instant play about the recession. That kind of second-guessing of the audience never works, he says./ppStill, artworks that offer neither escapism nor explanation might struggle in the great freeze. There will surely be a diminished appetite for miserable stories that don't even offer the consolation of enhanced understanding of the upheaval. I'm told there were an unusually high number of empty seats at the Oxford Playhouse when the touring production of Liberty, set in the France of 1793, arrived this autumn. Apparently people weren't in the mood to spend an evening contemplating Robespierre's Terror. (Users of guardian.co.uk were similarly reluctant to wallow in the details of the Baby P case.)/ppTwo big movies were released last week: Four Christmases, a light comedy with Reese Witherspoon, went straight to number one. Trailing behind it was The Changeling, Angelina Jolie's grim tale of a mother's search for a missing child. Similarly, it will be fascinating to see if the publishing subgenre known as "misery lit" continues to enjoy its past dominance of the bestsellers list. Right now, the hardback non-fiction top 10 is entirely made up of the comfort food of celebrity biography, topped by Dawn French's Dear Fatty - surely the literary equivalent of a sticky toffee pudding./ppThere are other clues to the cultural future besides the twin paths marked escape or understand. Price is one. Just as local pizzerias are holding up while posh restaurants expect to struggle, so culture that comes cheap has better prospects for survival. Sky subscriptions and DVD sales are so far weathering the recession. When you're counting the pennies, a ready meal and a film on the telly suddenly looks like a good bet./ppParadoxically, that could tilt the landscape towards high culture. If government subsidies get cut, many in the arts predict it will be smaller, grassroots projects that feel the knife: they're easier to slice than the heavy-hitting opera companies and art galleries. And while commercial theatre might take a pounding, the major subsidised institutions will still be left standing. /ppBut what if things get really severe? Reading could make a comeback, predicts John Carey, former Merton Professor of English at Oxford. In the 1930s, he says, some of the poorest turned to books for diversion. "Reading is astoundingly cheap," he says. "Libraries must be the cheapest form of entertainment possible." Classics were especially popular: they were inexpensive and available. "Social histories of the time are full of references to Dickens," says Carey./ppStill, the biggest cultural impact of the recession may be unseen for decades to come. Hytner notes that the great plays of the depression era - by Arthur Miller or Clifford Odets - came years later. It is the children of the slump, those witnessing their parents losing their jobs or businesses, who we should be watching. The seed of their future work is being planted right now. /ppa href="mailto:freedland@guardian.co.uk"br /freedland@guardian.co.uk/a/pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/recession"Recession/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/useconomicgrowth"US economic growth and recession/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/creditcrunch"Credit crunch/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/tesco"Tesco/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/supermarkets"Supermarkets/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/retail"Retail industry/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/YJLdrZRupLEbqAyvMC8RCxJtgGk/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/YJLdrZRupLEbqAyvMC8RCxJtgGk/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/43031?ns=guardianpageName=Business%3A+The+road+to+ruinch=Businessc3=The+Guardianc4=Automotive+industry+%28Business%29%2CGeneral+Motors%2CFord%2CBusiness%2CUS+economy+%28Business%29%2CUS+news%2CWorld+newsc5=Motoring%2CNot+commercially+useful%2CBusiness+Markets%2CUS+Economyc6=Ed+Pilkingtonc7=2008_12_03c8=1127737c9=articlec10=GUc11=Businessc12=Automotive+industryc13=c14=h2=GU%2FBusiness%2FAutomotive+industry" width="1" height="1" //divpThe Ford plant in Highland Park, a city within the city of Detroit, is a monument to the American automobile. It opened in 1910, and three years later pioneered the world's first car assembly line. In 1925, it spewed out 9,000 Model Ts in a single day. The revolution that turned America into a car-owning democracy had arrived. Today, there is ample evidence of that revolution. The factory looks over a six-lane highway that is heavy with traffic from dawn to dusk. Next door is a drive-thru McDonald's, where customers come to order Big Macs before rolling 50 metres to a drive-thru chemists to pick up indigestion tablets./ppThe story of the plant is told in one of those green-and-gold heritage plaques erected by the main entrance. It says: "Mass production soon moved from here to all phases of American industry and set the pattern of abundance for 20th-century living." Pattern of abundance: the phrase reads like a sick joke, for the Ford factory it describes is a shell of what it once was. Its red brick and granite walls still stand proud, framed by decorative mosaics. But the windows are broken or boarded up, its ceilings have gaping holes, the floor is covered in broken lumps of fallen plaster. On the roof, the flagpole that for years flew the Stars and Stripes is rusty and bare./ppOther companies, other countries, might have turned Henry Ford's factory of dreams into a museum rather than let it decay into the pitiful wreck that it is today. But Ford, and its fellows in the Big Three - General Motors (GM) and Chrysler - have enough to do staying alive without worrying about preserving the past. GM, the giant of the three, has lost $73bn in the past three years; it is haemorrhaging $2bn a month. At that rate it will run out of cash by the middle of next year and collapse by that year's end, potentially bringing millions of workers down with it. Which is why the CEOs of the three giants took their begging bowls to Washington earlier this month, pleading for a "bridging loan" of $25bn./ppThey didn't get a warm reception. They were ridiculed by senators for having flown in three separate corporate jets, an act that must rank among the most impressive PR disasters of the decade. But what the senators and the largely hostile media coverage missed was that the miserable condition of the Detroit car industry is not merely a comment on the failed leadership of its corporate executives, though it is that. It is also a matter of personal survival for millions of Americans who depend, directly or indirectly, on the revolution Henry Ford began 100 years ago./ppNowhere is this more visible than in Detroit, the crucible of the Big Three. Half of GM's 100,000 workers live in the city, and they in turn support a spider's web of relatives, spin-off industries and services. Detroit is really nothing but a company town. Hamtramckis a city within the city that borders one of GM's main factories. When GM enjoyed good times, Hamtramck boomed. Now GM is in the doldrums, Hamtramck is too. We walk along a stretch of shops along one of its main streets. First in line is Anna's Beauty Salon: it's closed, but the sign on the door suggests Anna is managing to stay open four days a week. Next, Popular Fashion and Variety Store: shut down. Billiards and Burger Hall: abandoned. Antiques store, an oil painting portraying an autumn landscape still in its window: deserted. Law offices: vacant. Funeral home: open. Even in a recession, one aspect of life must go on - the ending of it./ppOn the other side of the road is the Family Donut shop, a local institution run by a Polish family for the past 28 years. It has a picture of Princess Diana on the wall, a gift from one of the regular clients, and another of the Three Stooges. The owner, Vojno, is unloading a bundle of cardboard boxes used to pack the donuts. A few years ago he would order up to 30 bundles a month; now it's 10. On Polish festive days, there would be a line of customers out the door and round the corner, and the stools at the counter would be loaded. Today, the line is more of a dribble and the counter is largely empty. Unless GM recovers, and money starts flowing again, he will have to close in a few months. "It's not just me. Everybody around here is going to shut down," he says. What will he do if he does have to close? "I'll stay home and sleep. I'm hungry for sleep," he says./ppOne of the few clients, dressed in a bomber jacket with Detroit written across the back, shouts over at him. "You only work one job, so why do you need to sleep?"/pp"Shut up, Eddie," Vojno replies./pp"I work three jobs to make my money," Eddie Fabiszak says, prompting the only other customer in the bakery to say, under his breath: "Lucky man."/ppThe other customer is Melis Lejlic, 27, a naturalised American originally from Bosnia. His father and mother, two uncles and a cousin all work in the car business. All now fear redundancy. Lejlic works in construction, but that is no better. Car workers are no longer spending on home improvements, so demand for his work has fallen by half. Of 10 builders he knows, seven are unemployed. "Everybody in a small town like this is looking to the car industry, and there's no hope there," he says. "Drive around, you'll see. Detroit is worse right now than Baghdad."/ppThe comparison sounds far-fetched, but in the streets around the GM plant you can see what he means. Several houses have no glazing in their rickety wooden walls. Front lawns have turned into littered pasture. Walls are lined with barbed wire. A mural of a Stars and Stripes has been graffitied. And though it is nothing like Baghdad, there is clearly a market in lawlessness. A poster advertising the services of a lawyer says: "Aggressive criminal defence. Drugs CCW [carrying a concealed weapon] Theft Murder All felonies misdemeanours." That is how Henry Ford's dream looks in November 2008./ppGM's headquarters in downtown Detroit dominate the city's skyline. The seven cylindrical glass towers of the Renaissance Centre were built in 1977 as a statement of the company's untouchable status as the then unquestioned king of the auto world. Inside the main tower, there is an exhibition of some of GM's most memorable models, dating back to the 1950s. It is almost shocking to see how beautiful and exhilarating those cars were. There is a 1953 Chevrolet Corvette Roadster, built largely by hand, its white, sensuous curves set off by red leather seats. Then there's a 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air in black, the quintessential car of the American dream, big enough to carry a family to its suburban home but sufficiently powerful and sleek to avoid any sense of frumpiness. Pride of place goes to a 1959 Cadillac series 62 convertible, which is an outrageously attractive work of art. This was the baby of Harley Earl, GM's legendary designer. Inspired by the tail of a second world war fighter plane, he placed fins on the back of the car, with rear brake lights the shape of rockets and exhausts mimicking those of a jet. The 59 Cadillac summed up an entire generation - young, dangerous, fast, unstoppable./ppPeter DeLorenzo spent 22 years working in the car business as an advertising and marketing consultant and now runs an influential website called Autoextremist. He explains that when the explosion of creativity burst out in the 50s, Detroit had just emerged from the crucial role it had played as the manufacturing backbone of the war effort, churning out tanks and missiles at extraordinary rate, and confidence was riding high. "Coming out of the second world war, the automobile was the symbol of American might. GM was the symbol of American might, and most Americans were proud that GM was a successful corporation that turned out magnificent cars people wanted."/ppThe design-led strategy not only generated exquisite cars, it worked handsomely for GM. In 1955, four out of every five cars around the world were US-produced and half of those came from GM. The Big Three monopolised around 95% of the domestic market, and between them they transformed the US. They provided the stimulus for the biggest construction project in world history - the laying of the US interstate highways - and gave birth to the suburbs and to urban sprawl. Think Los Angeles. Think Phoenix rising out of the desert of Arizona./ppHow you get from the invincibility of those days to the verge of bankruptcy is a cautionary tale for the whole of America as its dominance wanes in an increasingly globalised economy. DeLorenzo, who has written a book called The United States of Toyota, dates the start of the rot to 1979 - just after GM had moved into its monolithic new headquarters in the Renaissance Centre. By then Japanese car companies were already snapping at the heels of the Big Three, but Detroit ignored the threat, steeped in complacency that the good times would last for ever. Leadership within the business also crucially changed hands, from the designers to what DeLorenzo calls the "bean counters". /ppBy the 1990s, the Big Three's reputation for innovation and beauty had withered, replaced by a reputation for faulty products. "People started to associate Detroit with cars coming off the assembly line and their doors falling off," says Micheline Maynard, a New York Times business reporter and author of The End of Detroit: How the Big Three Lost Their Grip. She recounts how in 2002 GM's vice-chairman, Bob Lutz, declared that their vehicles were every bit as reliable as Honda's and Toyota's; that same afternoon GM recalled 1.5m minivans./ppFrom the sleek elegance of the 1959 Cadillac to the lumpen brutality of the Hummer: what was in the mind of the GM executive who conceived putting a machine modelled on armoured vehicles on to the civilian streets of US cities, at barely 13 miles per gallon? But then Lutz has argued that that hybrids like the Toyota Prius "make no economic sense" and once called global warming "a total crock of shit"./ppThe other key element in the demise of Detroit concerns the staple of the American auto industry - the car worker. Ron Nidiffer is drinking beer in the New Dodge Lounge in Hamtramck, temporarily off work as the GM plant has suspended production for want of sales. He has worked in car factories for 36 years, 10 of them on the assembly line. He is one of a dying breed of car workers who had their pay and conditions set back in the heyday. His union, the United Auto Workers, negotiated a series of deals in the 1970s and 80s that have become the albatross around the industry's neck. He makes $29 an hour - substantially more than American workers in Japanese plants that have been transplanted to the non-unionised south, from Alabama to Texas. /ppBut the trouble really starts when you include the so-called "legacy costs", the generous terms agreed for pensions and health care that allowed workers to retire as young as 48. GM now carries about 470,000 retirees and spouses on benefits - more than four times its productive workforce - adding a total of about $2,000 for every car it makes, a terrible burden in the face of fierce foreign competition./ppThe symbol of excess that the UAW's critics like to point to is the "jobs banks", by which workers are paid 95% of their salaries for doing nothing. The scheme was introduced as a way of ensuring minimum employment levels, but billowed uncontrollably until it included about 40,000 workers. Nidiffer concedes that looking back, the jobs bank was indefensible. "Yes, it was a bad idea. And I understand why some people are jealous of what we've had. We had good conditions, even to excess."/ppBut what annoys him is the assumption that the largesse and complacency that epitomised the attitude of both unions and management is still prevalent today. The job banks have been whittled down to 3,500 workers, and wages have been cut in half for all new employees. He is one of the last at the GM plant in Hamtramck to enjoy the old $29 an hour rate, the others having taken redundancy. A deal has also been struck to lift the burden of legacy costs from GM's shoulders by transferring health insurance into an independent fund administered by the union. After all that, to hear Congress turn away the plea for $25bn from the Big Three CEOs makes Nidiffer see red. "I'm extremely mad. We've made all these concessions, taken the hit, and yet we're still accused of being lazy and greedy."/ppIt has not made him any happier that while Congress rebuffed Detroit, it has bailed out the banks with apparent alacrity, including Citibank which was last week handed the exact amount requested by the Big Three. "We're looking for a pittance compared with what they've given the banks," Nidiffer says. His anger is echoed in the front-page headline in the Detroit Free Press: "$85 billion for AIG. $700 billion for financial firms. $25 billion for Citigroup. Why is the bar so high for $25 billion to Detroit?"/ppNidiffer's frustration is heightened by his belief that if Detroit can see it through another 18 months it will have turned the corner. His GM plant is poised to produce the Volt, a new plug-in electric hybrid that will run for 40 miles on one full battery before a tiny petrol motor recharges it. The cutting-edge model, which goes into production in 2010, has been spearheaded by Bob Lutz, the global warming sceptic - a sign of how dramatically the outlook has changed at GM./ppBut none of the new ideas being scrambled out by the Big Three will matter if they fail to make it to 2010. Will the Volt go down in history as a great idea that GM carried with it to its grave? "There used to be a saying, so goes GM, so goes the country," Nidiffer says. "That was in happy days. But the same is true now. If GM goes under, the ripple effect will be felt throughout America."/ppA car worker desperate to hold on to his job would say that, wouldn't he? But economists agree. Susan Helper, a professor at Case Western university, says if GM went into bankruptcy next year, it could set in train a knock-on effect that would hit not just the 240,000 employees of the Big Three, but also 730,000 suppliers and about 1 million people working in dealerships across the country. Harder to quantify, but potentially even more devastating, would be the loss of social capital - the knowledge that is imbedded in a generation. "The idea that you can just liquidate Detroit and start again is crazy. Knowledge is not held by any one person, but comes from how people in a company interact."/ppCrunch time is coming. The tragedy of the American car is approaching its climax. You can feel it, palpably, on the lot of Galeana's Dodge dealership, a short drive away from Nidiffer's watering hole. Balloons in red, white and blue festoon the long line of cars, but who are they fooling? A more accurate reflection of the mood are the signs propped up under a succession of bonnets that spell the word S-A-L-E. Inside, a query about how things are going is met with the reply: "Look at the board." The board in question has just one car handwritten on it - the extent of today's business. Two years ago, the daily average was 15 cars./ppChrysler, which owns the Dodge brand, used to offer huge discounts on the price of the cars disguised as leasing agreements. But in July it announced it was suspending all leasing, and business went through the floor. The Big Three can no longer afford to lower their prices, so instead the cars sit on the lot, looking cheerful beneath the balloons. There is one small cause for hope for Galeana's dealers. A local Chrysler plant has just announced 5,000 job losses, and each worker made redundant will be given a voucher to buy a new Dodge car. It's come to this: the only chink of light for the dealers are the redundancy packages of the workers who make the cars they sell./ppThis week, the CEOs of the Big Three have one last shot at saving Detroit. They are travelling back to Washington to plead their case again. And this time, they won't be going by private jet - Ford's Alan Mulally will drive a Ford hybrid, and GM chief executive Rick Wagoner and Chrysler CEO Bob Nardelli will fly on commercial planes. Tomorrow and on Friday, they will present Congress committees with a new business plan that is expected to include a cap on top bosses' pay, concessions from the UAW and the death of the most loss-making brands. Less certain is the outcome. Will they get their $25bn and, if they do, will it be anywhere like enough? Or will this once great institution, this embodiment of American might and ingenuity - and with it the livelihood of millions - go the way of Henry Ford's factory of dreams./pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/automotive"Automotive industry/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/generalmotors"General Motors/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/ford"Ford/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/useconomy"US economy/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/usa"United States/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/LPbma0ZH57Qib3vjcofBZfL78zw/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/LPbma0ZH57Qib3vjcofBZfL78zw/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/71206?ns=guardianpageName=Business%3A+Mighty+Tesco+feels+bite+of+the+Hamsterch=Businessc3=The+Guardianc4=Tesco+%28Business%29%2CMorrisons+%28Business%29%2CSupermarkets+%28business%29%2CAdvertising+%28media%29%2CCredit+crunch+%28Business%29%2CRecession+%28UK%29%2CUK+news%2CBusiness%2CMediac5=Credit+Crunch%2CNot+commercially+useful%2CBusiness+Markets%2CMedia+Weekly%2CAdvertising+Mediac6=Julia+Finchc7=2008_12_03c8=1127801c9=articlec10=GUc11=Businessc12=Tescoc13=c14=h2=GU%2FBusiness%2FTesco" width="1" height="1" //divpOn one side there is an ageing crooner in a cardigan and on the other an impish TV presenter who favours wooden beads. It is Countdown vs Top Gear with Des O'Connor versus Richard Hammond - and the man known as The Hamster is winning hands down./ppHammond and O'Connor are going head-to-head as the Christmas TV faces of two of the UK's biggest supermarkets, and O'Connor's Tesco is now trailing way behind Hammond's Morrisons. Tesco, the UK's biggest retailer, yesterday revealed its worst sales figures for 14 years. Like-for-like sales - which exclude gains from new stores - were ahead just 2% in the last three months, or half the growth achieved in the previous quarter./ppIn an unusually gloomy quarterly trading update, Tesco's chief executive, Sir Terry Leahy, blamed the economic downturn: "We are pleased with our progress, but we are also realistic - the current economic climate and the strain this is putting on consumers everywhere is something that all businesses are feeling, including ours." But not all supermarkets are as gloomy. Bradford-based Morrisons is - so far - storming through the recession. Tomorrow it is expected to reveal recent sales up around 7.5% on last year - maintaining much the same impressive rate of growth as it reported three months ago./ppTesco's performance is also markedly worse than its rivals Sainsbury and Asda. Sainsbury - which has hired "I'm a Celebrity ..." hosts Ant and Dec to star in its adverts alongside its usual frontman Jamie Oliver - last month revealed like-for-like sales up 3.9%. Meanwhile Asda, which is reflecting the new austerity by shunning celebrities and filming traditional family Christmas ads in the Yorkshire Dales, grew 6.9% in the three months to the end of September. But Morrisons is now top of the pile, pulling in thousands of new shoppers every week, especially in the south-east, where it was almost unheard of until a couple of years ago./ppThe Morrisons empire, built by Sir Ken Morrison, was always a fiercely Yorkshire business. But it descended into chaos, with tumbling sales and profits after it took over its larger rival Safeway. Shareholders demanded a management shake-up and Marc Bolland was installed as chief executive, even though he had spent his career working for Dutch brewer Heineken and had never run a shop. Bolland did, however, understand marketing./ppThe stores were given a new green and yellow look and out went the outmoded "More reasons to shop at Morrisons" adverts. In their place Bolland brought in a raft of celebrities - Denise van Outen, Lulu, Alan Hansen, Nick Hancock and, more recently, Richard Hammond./ppThe TV adverts now concentrate on image, while press adverts go toe-to-toe with Tesco and the others on price. One retail executive said: "It was an old-fashioned grocer competing with the slicker marketing of rivals. The new Bolland empire has given the brand a slick new look and feel. He has taken the brand and the business and given it a polish". It is, however, far too soon to write off Tesco. Yesterday's poor sales figures were actually slightly better than most City experts had predicted, and its shares rose. The grocer, which accounts for pound;1 out of every pound;7 spent on the UK high street, decided months ago that a full-scale recession was on its way and, in a bid to stop bargain-hunting shoppers drifting away to discount outlets such as Aldi and Lidl, launched its own range of Discounter goods./ppIn September, some 350 new lines - from Shampoo to curry sauce and teabags - went onto Tesco's shelves. The range was the biggest since Tesco launched its Value label in the last recession, with prices higher than Value, but lower than the premium, proprietary brands and the grocer's standard own-label equivalents. The supermarket rebranded itself as "Britain's biggest discounter" and the bargain range has been expanded to 800 products. Yesterday's lower sales figures, said Tesco, are a direct result of introducing these lower-priced goods. "We think this is the right strategy to help our business and our customers through the tougher times ahead."/ppAccording to Tesco, the new range is pulling in 300,000 new customers a week and now accounts for 5% of everything that goes through its tills. At the same time, sales of higher-priced organic foods and the grocer's Finest upmarket heat-and-eat meals has gone into reverse. Aside from the impact of the discount range, the big supermarkets are currently locked in a fierce price war. For retailers, discounting means selling more just to stand still./ppCity analysts were yesterday divided over exactly whether Tesco was cleverly planning for the future, or falling out of favour. Oriel Securities said it was obvious that shoppers were switching to Tesco's lower-priced Discounter range "but in general we are seeing a waning in the UK's love affair with the market leader"./ppBut another from broker Cazenove, said the data showed Tesco "is back on the front foot in the UK and is ahead of its competitors in preparing for battle fought in a deflationary world"./pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/tesco"Tesco/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/morrisons"Morrisons/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/supermarkets"Supermarkets/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/advertising"Advertising/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/creditcrunch"Credit crunch/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/recession"Recession/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/CLbwvFvARtn2nH1AAGdlSI88mF4/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/CLbwvFvARtn2nH1AAGdlSI88mF4/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

a href="http://adage.com/mediaworks/article.php?article_id=132957"img src="http://adage.com/images/bin/image/rightrail/120208-Grinch.jpg?1228258426" width="255" height="191" alt="" /br //aMINNEAPOLIS (AdAge.com) -- In a case of art imitating life, the Grinch tried to steal Christmas twice on Monday. The first Grinch was embodied by the faceless National Bureau of Economic Research, which confirmed we#039;re in a recession. The second appeared on ABC. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/EN0CAutrkk7jAp2trOZdkAbyW6U/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/EN0CAutrkk7jAp2trOZdkAbyW6U/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/adage/complete/~4/Tzs4zMcmDIQ" height="1" width="1"/

Among the stock activity stories for Tuesday, Dec. 2, from AP Financial News: SAN FRANCISCO (AP)--Yahoo Inc.'s stock rallied Tuesday on a report that AOL's former chief executive believes he can raise enough money in a worsening recession to buy the struggling Internet company for as much as $30 billion.div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/ibtimes/tech?a=ZPFXO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/ibtimes/tech?i=ZPFXO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/ibtimes/tech?a=TOAKo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/ibtimes/tech?i=TOAKo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/ibtimes/tech?a=eQiAo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/ibtimes/tech?i=eQiAo" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ibtimes/tech/~4/472977431" height="1" width="1"/

a href="http://adage.com/mediaworks/article.php?article_id=132955"/aNEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Dell has pulled out of its long-term contracts to run ads on the back covers of business magazines including Fortune and The Economist, a retreat that only underscores magazines#039; vulnerability during this recession. Philips took the place of Dell on the back cover of Fortune#039;s Dec. 8 issue, but only committed to a single issue. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/ZZ2VCLRradCVIBxcP9m9cXdJ2mw/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/ZZ2VCLRradCVIBxcP9m9cXdJ2mw/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/adage/complete/~4/4w3Gyw2R5sA" height="1" width="1"/

Its confirmed: were in a recession. The people and companies that make up the tech industry long ago figured that one out. Heres how theyre dealing with it.

Its confirmed: were in a recession. The people and companies that make up the tech industry long ago figured that one out. Heres how theyre dealing with it.

As the world slips into recession, it is also on the brink of a synthetic CDO cataclysm that could actually save the global banking system. nbsp; nbsp; It is a truly great irony that the world’s banks could end up being saved not by governments, but by the synthetic CDO time bomb that they set ticking with their own questionable practices during the credit boom. nbsp; nbsp; Alternatively, the triggering of default on the trillions of dollars worth of synthetic CDOs that were sold before 2007 could be a disaster that tips the world from recession into depression. Nobody knows, but it won’t be a small event. nbsp; nbsp; A HREF=http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/market-movers/2008/12/01/whats-a-super-senior-tranche?tid=truePortfolio: What's a Super-Senior Tranche?/A nbsp; nbsp; A HREF=http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2008/12/02/18962/synthetic-cdos-not-saving-anything/?source=rssFinancial Times Alphaville: Synthetic CDOs not Saving Anything./A nbsp; nbsp; Warning: critical mass wonkitude.

psource: a href=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/01/AR2008120101559.html?sid=ST2008120101635amp;s_pos=The Washington Postbr //a/p p style=text-align: justify;nbsp;/p p style=text-align: justify; The pledges to take aggressive action come as the recession appears to be getting worse.....quot;Right now, we still seem to be in an accelerating downslope of this economic cycle,quot; said Ethan Harris, head of U.S. economic research at a href=http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Barclays+plc?tid=informlineBarclays Capital/a. /p

psource: a href=http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087amp;sid=aXTWFDfLt8KMamp;refer=worldwideBloomberg/a/p p style=text-align: justify;Dec. 2 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. economy, now officially in recession, may be in the midst of the longest slump in the post- World War II era as job losses mount and credit dries up.nbsp; nbsp;nbsp; /p