Syl, take a look at industrial metals. They are pricing in significantly slowing demand.
I sell to retail. I can tell you the real situation out there is not as you see described in the papers. People are chasing bargains and deals. If you give it away, people will buy it. That's not going to be a profit driver, and profits are what keeps business going.
On the business investment front, we can switch our entire phone system to IP phones for about $130 per hand set plus about $10k for the software. It's using Asterisk, an open source system. That's going to kill the cash cow proprietary stuff out there for IP phones, and start-ups and established companies are gearing and writing code and developing product for the open source IP stuff now.
For every tech gadget you see increasing in sales, there are other ones dropping. When they're real business investment items, it's a more dramatic event.
The economy is not just financials. However, the economy has grown the past 25-years on credit expansion, and the amount of available credit is going to contract as the lending base is adjusted due to the mortgage writeoffs. That impacts everything.
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