Clark Howard talks black friday, bailout, Americans saving money and the Mumbai terror attack

Clark Howard talks black friday, bailout, Americans saving money and the Mumbai terror attacks

Interesting articles from Clark Howard’s website:

Black Friday sales up, day marred by tragic trampling

Black Friday took a tragic turn when a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death by a mob of riotous shoppers in New York. Early reports suggested that many shoppers wouldn’t let other workers get to the fallen employee to help him; they just kept trampling over his body. The police had been called in for crowd control, but had to leave because there were 3 other near-riots underway at other stores. Read the full story.

Younger people doing a better job at saving than 50+ crowd

Clark has whined for years about how much we as a country have refused to save. In recent years, in fact, we had even ventured into the land of negative net savings rates for the first time ever — even counting the Great Depression years!

But now we’re in a process of “de-leveraging” and some people are beginning to save again. The chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com now predicts the saving rate will be at 3 percent in a year and 8 percent after 2010. Read the full story.

Mortgage rates going down and down

CLARKONOMICS: The federal government over Thanksgiving put up more money for the bailout. According to Bloomberg, funding for the federal bailout in total now stands at $8.5 trillion. That’s 8,500 billion dollars! Read the full story.

Clark responds to terror attack in India

The natural inclination following terrorist attacks like those in Mumbai is to recoil in fear and revulsion. Many people also mentally scratch India off their list of places to visit. But not Clark — he instead went on his computer and looked for travel deals to India. Clark’s thinking is let’s not give the terrorists what they want by living in fear of them.

It’s the same reason why he did 2 shows directly from New York just days after 9/11.

We as a nation have been doing a lot of soul-searching about how to deal with terrorism in the world. There are going to be a lot of U-turns and dead ends on the road ahead. Historians will have to tell us if going into Iraq was the right move, but Clark believes there should be no question about having gone into Afghanistan.

Closer to home, the penny-pincher encourages you to do what you can to help your country. Back in 2001, he was proud to join his state guard as a way to do his part.

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