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November 22, 2008
Posted: 2128 GMT
ATLANTA, Georgia – Lately, I feel like Alice in Wonderland, peering through the looking glass. I just paid half of what I used to for a tank of gas. Great deals beckon at the malls, just in time for the holidays. But why am I uneasy? Nothing is as it seems these days. Even good news is a bad sign. Lower prices mean businesses are in trouble. Big discounts at sales are not making people buy. More and more are losing their jobs. Last week, 542,000 people applied for unemployment benefits, a 16-year-record for new jobless claims. Many others fear they could be next. No wonder they're not spending money. When people stop buying in America, there's deep trouble, because spending drives 70 percent of the economy. But business is being hit from another source as well. Banks are still not lending like they used to, freezing up operations. I heard one small business owner say he was forced to close shop when he couldn't get credit to finance his tree import business from Brazil. When he couldn't pay for his orders, he couldn't get the trees his customers ordered. Now his Brazilian exporting partner is in trouble too. Experts say it's going to get worse; they just don't know how much worse. It's hard to judge how it's all going to play out. We can only brace ourselves for what we still don't know. Posted by: CNN Anchor, Ralitsa Vassileva |
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