Forget about the office Christmas party this year, says Bill Bonner. That’s if you are lucky enough to still have a job. Throughout the country, businesses and households are cutting costs. And this is only the beginning. Bill says the Obama government will try to take up the slack in the economy. But that will just create more debt problems in the long term.

DHL Withdraws From U.S.; China ‘Stimulates’ Railway and Steel Industries; YouTube to Show Full-Length Flicks; McDonald’s October Sales Solid; DB Analysts Says GM Stock Worthless; Fannie Mae to Tap Fed Fund; Starbucks Profit Down 97%; U.S. Cotton Production Declines by a Third

We have to wait until Thursday this week for the economic calendar to get underway, and even then there isn’t too much going on outside of the Retail Sector.

A fun little bit of news out of the beautiful city of Prague today…

The first Burger King (NYSE:BKC) will open in Prague in the next few months. And it’s not only targeting the Czech Repbulic. It wants to become number one in European markets. To do that, it’s already got operations in Poland, Bulgaria and Hungary, and it planning joints in Slovakia and Slovenia.

But it’s got tough competition from McDonald’s (NYSE:MCD), who is top dog right now with 70 restaurants serving 53 million customers. It’s spent more than $172.2 million on restaurants in the Czech Republic.

When I was in Budapest, I grabbed a Whopper for a quick lunch before meeting my guide back at the hotel, Buro Panzio. It cost me 750 Forint,…

Gold prices have fluctuated wildly in the last week as jittery investors reacted to the meltdown in the financial markets and the government’s bailout proposals. Ed Bugos says gold’s fundamentals remain strong, however. He says the recent correction was a mistake by the market and that the outlook for rising inflation and a tumbling dollar makes a strong case for gold. Ed says investors should take advantage of short-term price dips to buy the shiny metal on the cheap.

It can be easy to forget that some of the world’s biggest companies started out as penny stocks. Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT), Starbucks (NASDAQ:SBUX), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) to name a few. Penny Sleuth’s Jim Nelson says penny stocks may carry more risk than blue-chips, but the success stories show the rewards can be worth the extra risk.

Andrew Gordon in Investor’s Daily Edge says The Economist’s Big Mac Index shows that the most overvalued currencies are currently all European. And the world’s most undervalued currencies are mostly Asian. It also signals that the dollar is overvalued against its Asian counterparts…

In April, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson called the bottom in the financial sector. He said: “I think were closer to the end of the [credit crisis] than we are to the beginning.

“The Rude Awakening’s editorial director Eric Fry thinks Hank was way off the mark. Eric says financial stocks will by a buy one day, but he doesn’t believe we are looking at a bottom now.

In the second part of The End of Peak Greed, Eric says investors are better off putting their money into companies that are making the world go around than betting on financials, which are sending it not a tailspin.

Monsanto Co. (MON), the world’s largest seed producer, is selling off its rights to a synthetic milk-producing hormone in order to focus its attention more closely on its core business of developing genetically modified seeds and pesticides. U.S. pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly & Co. (LLY) will pay Monsanto $300 million for Posilac, the brand name for recombinant bovine somatotropin or rBST. The deal includes the global sale rights and a Georgia-based manufacturing plant.

American consumer confidence is edging up, but it is still close to its historic low, according to the ABC News Consumer Comfort Index. Jamie Ellis in Whiskey and Gunpowder says such figures may not be a useful measure. Better look at how consumers act rather than how they say they feel…