Lusitania sinks

.. closer to junk bond level.

Bid, JJ, bid!

Rah, rah, rah -- pffft

Bio: Kira Plastinina is a 15 year old fashion designer from Russia. Kira's talent was noticed by her father who was a CEO at a produce company in Russia. He later retired and put his efforts towards investing in his daughter's talents. Kira Plastinina has been a huge hit since then. Buy, JJ, buy!

Smuggling the good stuff

The goods that come through the tunnels include livestock, cement, steel rods, refrigerators and computer screens, along with Coca-Cola, cigarettes and pharmaceuticals such as the erectile-dysfunction drug, Viagra. At a mobile-telephone store in Gaza City, a smuggled Apple iPod Nano 4-gigabyte model sells for $500. It lists for $149.99 on Amazon.com. Making an honest buck on Planet Pepe.

Escape from suburbia

Our tax dollars hard at work

Some useful gifts

Don’t know what to buy as a Christmas present for your girl? The answer is really simple - electric toothbrush. There you go.

Let's go to Ghana

An offshore-oil discovery, rising commodity prices and government spending on roads and other projects drove the market to a 64 percent gain this year, making it the world's best- performing bourse. Ghana doesn't have electronic trading. Traders scribble bid and asking prices on whiteboards. Sounds good to me. Buy, JJ, buy!

Buy, JJ, buy!

One of the few places of market optimism on Friday was Zimbabwe, an economically troubled part of Africa. The Zimbabwe Industrial Index gained 249.90% on Friday in a bizarre response to the country's hyperinflation. Many vendors prefer to barter rather than accept near worthless cash, so residents with extra money are piling it into the stock market, hoping for gains once the country's violent political situation is resolved.

Go for it. Zimbabwe beats Wall Street these days, that's for sure.

Buy, JJ, buy!

GM falls to 1950 levels. To put the current price tag in perspective, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, of which GM is a component, closed 1951 at a mere 269 points. In fact, the last time GM traded at around $5.40 a share, a typical car sold for just over $3,000, gasoline cost 20 cents a gallon, a six-pack of Coke could be yours for 37 cents, and houses went for $16,000.

JJ tries a new investment strategy

[He] recently bypassed the stock market for liquid assets -- $120,000 in champagnes. He bought 400 bottles, mostly 1996 vintage, that he says he plans to "sit on" for 10 or 15 years and then sell at a profit. "It sure beats looking at a Merrill Lynch monthly statement. The worst thing that could happen is that I drink all of it."