Xerox Corp. (NYSE: XRX), the world’s leading document management, technology and services enterprise, recently announced that chief executive officer, Anne Mulcahy, will retire on July 1st and will be succeeded by Ursula Burns, the company’s president. According to the company, Mulcahy will continue to support the transition following her retirement on July 1st and will be at the office full time to ensure a smooth transfer of power and also handle customer relations and strategy.

Mulcahy was appointed in 2001 after the company fired G. Richard Thoman amid mounting financial debt and losses. Mulcahy is credited with leading the document management company out of a deep financial slump earlier in the decade. This transition has been in the works for the past two years since Burns was named president in April 2007.

Burns, however, takes the top job in a period of renewed stress due to the national recession, which has severely

If the new president looked a little, well, burdened on election night, chances are he’s aging a couple of years in the six-hour span between the release of unemployment figures this morning and his first news conference as president-elect this afternoon.

6.5% unemployment in October — worst since early Clintontime.  Worse still were the revisions of the August and September numbers.  And as Karl Denninger noticed, the number of unemployed plus the number of people working part-time who’d like to work full-time now tops 11%.  (And who knows what the real figure would turn out to be once John Williams applies Carter-era standards to the numbers.)

As I write, the president-elect is meeting with his “Transition Economic Advisory Board,” his temporary brain trust as it were.  The names on the panel are, well, interesting.  Some of the faces from I.O.U.S.A. are there.  But one has to wonder if