So why is this happening? It’s not as though Wall Street is on some hiring bonanza. And while construction jobs are on the rise, the sector isn’t a runaway success. Many areas that men traditionally rely on for employment aren’t performing.

Americans not scrimping on clothes this fall - study

"There isn't necessarily a pattern that we see that says if
back-to-school is good that holiday will be good. It's worth
waiting till August results to get to that," he said.

Yet those same policies and practices that sparked Japan's miracle have come to strangle it. Japan has remained wedded to the same basic growth model it used in its miracle years — bureaucracy-led policymaking and a die-hard devotion to exports and manufacturing — even though it no longer fits Japan's modern, high-cost economy or keeps the country competitive. Though Japan's financial sector generally avoided the subprime-induced meltdown that hit the U.S., it got smacked much harder by the global downturn. In 2009 the economy sank 5.2% compared to 2.4% in the U.S.

Speaking of thin, LG says its 55-inch OLED display is a trifling four millimeters thick and weighs just 16.5 pounds. Read that again: four millimeters. Note to James Bond and Jason Bourne: Don’t bother clobbering bad guys with one of these, because you might as well use tissue paper.