The luxury lifestyle company Michael Kors Holdings surprised everyone recent, raising almost $1 billion in an initial public offering. 47.2 million shares were sold, each for $20. This generated proceeds of $944 million and sets the company at a value of about $3.82 billion.

Kors is one of the judges on the hit TV show “Project Runway” and he is the founder and CCO of the company. As Francis Gaskins, the IPOdesktop.com analyst said, “A company like this can go public even in an uncertain market based on their recent successes. They’ve done a lot of things correctly in the past couple of years.”

This example of one of many that shows the luxury good industry rebounding favorably after the sharp drop in 2009. Analysts see 2011 as a record year for the industry, particularly for upscale watchmakers, hotels, fashion designers and leather goods groups. Italian fashion house Prada SpA has a $2.1 billion IPO recently and Italian luxury shoemaker Salvatore Ferragamo had one at $487 million.

For many in the business world, it appears that Texas may be the place to be. Texas added 1.2 million net jobs since December of 2000, when Rick Perry took office as the Governor. This is in contrast to the 1.1 million jobs that the U.S. lost as a whole over the same time period. There has been a 40% rise in education and health services jobs this decade, and a 67% rise in mining jobs, all of which are fueling these numberes.

Moody’s Analytics shows that total employment in Texas is slated to expand 2.9% annually through 2015, which translates to 1.6 million new jobs for the state in the coming five years.

As Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi said, “Everyone is singing from the same hymn book at the Austin Chamber of Commerce.” Gov. Perry has been working hard to bring companies into the fold. In particular, while courting Washington State companies such as Amazon.com, Microsoft and Starbucks he wrote, “As the State of Washington considers a multibillion-dollar tax increase for citizens and businesses … I invite you to consider your future in America’s new land of opportunity: the State of Texas. If Washington doesn’t want your business, Texas does. Texas has no personal income tax and no interest in getting one.”

Fitch Ratings has let America know that there is little chance that the American rating will be influenced in the coming year by world events. A top analyst with the rating agency explained that there isn’t much possibility that a “material adverse shock” in the U.S. in 2012 will lead Fitch Ratings to cut the U.S.’s credit rating.

As analyst David Riley told Reuters in a recent interview, “You can never say never, but it’s not our expectation that there is going to be any material developments that would lead us to change the rating over the next 12 months.”

He continued by saying, “If we had a relatively short downturn because, for example, the crisis in Europe got much worse and there was a spillover effect to the U.S. but we thought that it ultimately would prove to be temporary for the U.S. … then that wouldn’t necessarily lead us to change the rating.”

Only one week ago, Boeing gushed that it had landed its biggest aircraft order ever. The order came from Dubai’s Emirates which ordered 50 Boeing 777s, with a total value of $18 billion.

Now, just one week later, Boeing is already crushing that record, as an order just came in from private carrier Lion Air of Indonesia. They have ordered 230 planes including 201 Boeing 737 “MAX” and 29 extended-range 737s. The order was actually announced by the White House during President Barack Obama’s recent trip to Bali, Indonesia.