2011 was a banner year for tourism in Miami-Dade as records were set not only for the number of tourists who stayed overnight in the county, but also for how much money they left behind. According to numbers released today by the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau 13.4 million tourists stayed over night in Miami-Dade in 2011, and they spent $20.7 billion dollars. Foreign tourists make up a significant amount of those tourists, and account for an even more significant amount of that spending.
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The Miami economy got a shock today when the county's largest private employer, the University of Miami, filed a notice that it plans to lay off 800 employees from its medical school. The move comes two weeks after university president Donna Shalala said the medical school was planning on cutting back. More >>

Like many small business owner on Florida, Paul Hodges has been struggling over the past few years. His Cocoa Beach motel, the Fawlty Towers, has seen its profits plummet. So, he's come up with a new plan to jolt his bottom line. Starting tomorrow the Fawlty Towers will now be a nudist colony. Nudity: it's clearly the Sunshine State's ticket out of the recession. Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?
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The next time you order a Domino's pizza, pity your humble delivery man. It's a precarious and potentially deadly world out there for your average door-to-door pie slinger. Take Francisco Prieto. The then-66-year-old Domino's employee was sent on a run to Liberty City around midnight in October 2010. No sooner had he handed over his cardboard cargo than three men jumped him.

Now Prieto is suing Domino's, claiming his former employer cruelly denied him workers' compensation for his injuries from that night and then unlawfully fired him.
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Hey, pssst, I've got a plot of beachfront property in beautiful Hialeah to sell you for just $10K. Yeah, I'm just gonna need your social and bank account info, and it's as good as yours.

Yes, to no one's surprise 247WallSt.com has ranked our sunny state of Florida number one in the shady arena of fraud.
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Gaston E. Cantens, a former advisory board member for Belen Jesuit Preparatory School who used his prominence in Miami's Cuban-American community to target the elderly, has been sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to running a $135 million Ponzi scheme.
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​Cecilia "C.C." Holloman arrived in Miami around 2001 with an impressive resumé. She was an ordained minister, a published Christian author, and a "community builder" in the Clinton administration.

Over the next decade, her organizations would receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal grants, including $400,000 for a job and community garden project called the Legacy Communities Initiative.

But fellow activists say the jobs never came, the gardens never grew, and C.C.'s only legacy has been the empty coffers she's left behind.

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​Unemployment may be staggeringly high in Florida, but according to a new analysis by On Numbers, the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale area added the 11th most private sector jobs of any metro area in 2011. That only added up to 21,600 new jobs, though. And, in terms of percentage growth, the area only ranked 43rd.
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​We're number one, and there's nothing to get excited about. Using criteria that included violent crime, political corruption, foreclosures, and unemployment, Forbes.com has ranked Miami as America's single most miserable city. We're up from second place last year.
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​You thought your 2011 finances were bad? Despite his NBA team having its best year ever, Micky Arison's net worth dropped somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.3 billion last year, according to Forbes. Arison's main source of income comes from his CEO role and hefty financial stake in Carnival Cruise Lines, and well, it wasn't a good year at sea.
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