lentinman: OT "bargains can wait"
Since it is unbelievably slow on this board, I'll go OT in the middle of the day.
I thought you were being a very big wet blanket until after I had clicked off of your post and these thoughts hit me:
For years, I watched tree after tree being felled and strip malls or houses going up. I thought of a wooden pyramid of prosperity being built, and the higher the pyrmaid the bigger the collapse. IMO a very high pyramid has been built, and the base of the pyramid is debt. The wood at the bottom caught fire recently. Uncle Sam's came to the rescue in his fire truck, but there are embers smoldering and are going to flare up--car loans and credit card debt.
Making things somewhat worse is that workers are actually starting to save their money. The irony of this is that the start of a recession is a very bad time for people to start saving their money. The more spending they curtail, the deeper the recession.
Preparing for the worst accelerates its arrival, kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy thing.
