Surviving the Recession
Now it is clear that the economy is slowing dramatically and many observers feel that we are headed into, or may already be in, a recession. The question is no longer if the economy is going to be slow in 2020, but how slow is it going to get. The credit crunch has lost its crisis atmosphere but many sectors of the credit markets remain paralyzed. We know about the impact on housing and related industries. But most people are only beginning to understand how the paralysis is affecting consumers in areas other than real estate. Nowhere is this understanding more apparent than in the performance of the equity markets over the past two weeks where traders who blindly ignored the warning signs for months suddenly see that the party ended some time ago. Declining home values have siphoned off more than $1 trillion of consumer purchasing power at a time when rising food and energy prices are devouring family budgets. Headline inflation, not "core" inflation but the real inflation...