Re excerpt: "The betting in some quarters is the Fed may not be able to keep the Great American Spending Machine fired up forever because the jobs market is scaring a lot of people."
There has been some (not nearly enough) media discussion of this emerging recession as being the first in a long time to be a "business-led" one. In other words, while consumers continue to heed every exhortation to Do the Right Thing, keep a cool head and continue to pump borrowed money into the US economy, the business community hits the panic button early and hard -- laying off workers, deferring investments and otherwise cutting spending wherever possible -- thus aggressively undermining consumer confidence and contributing directly to lower total demand.
In this and other ways, business shows a remarkable ability to malign individual consumers and investors for engaging in irrational, short-sighted behavior that business, itself, is ever more quickest to resort to. In times of extreme market volatility, e.g., I believe that it is the market professionals who are increasingly the first to be afflicted by the madness of crowds.
Carl
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