Posted with permission by Nicholas Benton, Owner/Editor of the Falls Church News Press

"We're trying to come to grips with the end of a 20-year secular credit expansion that went parabolic in the last six years," the chief North American economist for Merrill Lynch said on national TV yesterday.

"The U.S. economy is at the outset of the first consumer recession since the early 1990s, and it's facing headwinds comparable to the six-quarter recession that pushed the Standard & Poors Index down 40 percent in the 1970s," David Rosenberg said in a live interview on CNBC.

"We've gone from housing to credit to employment, and now I think we're going to start to see some negative consumer spending numbers now that we're past this fiscal stimulus program," he went on.

posted by permission of Nicholas Benton, owner/editor of the Falls Church News Press Benton anticipates today's headlines on Wachovia in his latest Op Ed.

Bernanke's Good Advice

For those who blame Sen. Chuck Schumer for the failure of the IndyMac Bank in California last weekend, alleging his identification of the bank's troubles triggered a run, what are they saying now about the prominent front page headline and story in yesterday's Washington Post baring Wachovia Bank's dirty laundry? What are they saying about the fact the FBI has now launched an investigation into IndyMac?

Those who urge us to "shoot the messenger" divert attention from the realities of the unraveling U.S. economy, including the role of predator lending in it, and are appealing to those incapable or unwilling to accept things as they actually are.

So it was with President Bush's lame attempt on national TV Tuesday to blame the nation's economic woes on "psychology." This, of course, comes from the man who sold us "weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," "we don't use torture," and other bald-faced lies.