Bernanke:What's In Your Wallet for Black Friday?

With the deep slump in housing, a lingering credit-crunch and rising oil prices, this will only weaken consumer spending and confidence for the next several months. Ironically, the media is claiming that Cyber Monday Nov. 26th was the biggest selling market day ever online!

Consumers have paid the $3-a-gallon gas prices. They've watched as their pay raises have been gobbled up by health insurance premiums. And the overall economic downturn has hit some of them so hard that they are among the record number of American homeowners facing foreclosure. The latest news reports cite how thousands of people flocked to a Walmart for a few hundred job openings recently.

How about this little gem - "each barrel is engraved on the bottom with the date it was made and the cost of a barrel of crude oil on that day." That way, some day you will have a memento of how cheap oil used to be."

The biggest post-Black Friday surge during the past 10 years was in 2003 – when the blue chip index soared 1.16 percent. But that had more to do with a pair of economic reports on manufacturing and construction than a strong retail sales reports, according to analysts.


Let’s back up a bit, here is the tragedy—people are having to worker harder to get raises and no telling how long we will have to be working to ensure that baby boomers (especially the ones on the tail end) will even have social security funds. But, even if you get a raise, the extra income won’t be able to keep pace with declines in the purchasing power of money, increases in expenses such as oil, decreases in the value of homes, declines in the value of stocks, and increases in taxes.

I think we are in a quagmire, if we look to the Feds to correct this situation here’s what we are up against. If the Feds lower the interest rates in this country, the international market will lean on us hard and we will feel it across the board and our wallets. And if the Feds raise the interest rates in the USA, we may likely see a disaster in our domestic economy.

I personally do not think the Feds have that much power one way or another. I also don't think the average citizen knows who to listen to or which TV channel has the right answers. I suppose it is like real estate- it is all local and each market has its own characterizations. I am not an economist, just my two cents. What's your take on this? Click on the comments link below to read what others say.