If you want to feel really good about the state of politics in Washington, look to Athens. Over the past few days, hooded extremists marched in the streets, and demonstrators waved E.U. flags with swastikas on them. Yet the Greek Parliament waited until the stroke of midnight on deadline day to hold a no-confidence vote on the current government in order to give legislators "more time" to discuss the issues. What's to discuss? The country is broke and couldn't grow ...

For Net-a-Porter, a London-based e-tailer of luxury-brand women's wear, the Great Recession wasn't even a speed bump. "We actually outperformed our own business plan. Sales were exceptional," says Natalie Massenet, the company's American founder and executive chairman. Its sales soared 53% in 2008. That recession-be-damned kind of growth prompted Swiss luxury-goods conglomerate Richemont, which already owned a third of the company, to buy the rest in a deal last April that valued it at $568 million at the time. In ...

If the U.S. economy had leaped from its worst five-month stretch in recent history to a record-breaking surge, Barack Obama could proudly announce, "The Great Recession is over." The country's finances have seen no such dramatic upturn, but in the movie business they're singing "Happy Days Are Here Again." The Hollywood hills are alive with the sound of money, and on this holiday weekend the cash registers were caroling with the top Memorial Day frame ever. Moviegoers ...

"It looks like this recession is finally over," declared Scott Davis, CEO of UPS, earlier this month while announcing 2009 earnings that were better than expected for the world's largest package carrier. Speaking to analysts on Feb. 2, Davis added, "Believe it or not, that makes 21 that UPS has successfully managed through." No doubt UPS shareholders are relieved after two of the hardest years in the 102-year-old firm's history. Indeed, only four months ago, the $45 billion company disclosed ...

The financial crises and recession of recent years left no part of the global economy unscathed, and that includes the rarified legal field, which has seen revenues drop 10% at U.S. firms since 2008. Yet perhaps no industry has been as slow to adapt to the international and technological challenges of this new austere era. And that reluctance to keep pace with the changing times seems especially evident at law schools, where "legal education hasn't really changed ...

Read "Where the Recession Proof Jobs Are". The best recession-proof jobs are those that are least sensitive to economic downturn, and which have the highest combined scores for pay, projected workforce growth, and number of openings. See pictures of office cubicles around the world. div { font-family: arial; font-size: 11px; text-align: left; } #305 { width: 525px; } .titlerow-a { background-color: #cc0000; float: left; width: 23px; font-weight: bold; padding-left: 0px; color:#fff;} .titlerow-b { background-color: #cc0000; float: left; width: 210px; text-align: left; ...

Not for many years has a Christmas season begun with so many tidings of spreading discomfort and lack of joy about the U.S. economy. Already racked by a devastating double-digit inflation, the nation is now also plunging deeper into a recession that seems sure to be the longest and could be the most severe since World War II. Consumers who a few weeks ago worried mostly about rising prices now fear for their jobs and incomes as well. For many ...

One of the great ironies revealed by the global recession that began in 2008 is that Communist Party–ruled China may be doing a better job managing capitalism's crisis than the democratically elected U.S. government. Beijing's stimulus spending was larger, infinitely more effective at overcoming the slowdown and directed at laying the infrastructural tracks for further economic expansion. As Western democracies shuffle wheezily forward, China's economy roars along at a steady clip, having lifted some half a billion people ...

Fewer people applied for unemployment benefits last week, a sign that layoffs are dropping and employers may be hiring more workers. The Labor Department says the number of people seeking benefits dropped 10,000 to 382,000 in the week ending April 2. That's the third drop in four weeks. The four-week average of applications, a less volatile measure, declined to 389,500. See TIME's special "Out of Work in America." Applications near ...

The Great Recession turned out to be quite good at keeping troubled unions together. Divorce rates fell every year in America during the economic downturn. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which tracks marriage statistics, there were 63,550 fewer divorces in America in 2009 than there were in 2006. Numbers aren't out for 2010, but divorce lawyers and marriage counselors say 2010 was likely the first year since the financial crisis that more couples ...