COMMENTS: More Money Worries
Prospects for a faltering economy made headlines for the second straight day. Yesterday a selloff on Wall Street was Story of the Day. Now attention turns to fears of recession. Benjamin Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, testified on Capitol Hill that the growth of consumer spending is likely to slow. He cited a trio of adverse factors--high energy prices, tight lending by banks, falling house values--even though his economists "have not calculated the probability of recession." Meanwhile, the retail sector's sales last month were sluggish, the slowest October in more than a decade. NBC had its sibling network CNBC lead with the economic Story of the Day. ABC and CBS each chose to start its newscast with the potential danger of collisions on airport runways.
Both CNBC's Trish Regan and CBS' Anthony Mason cast the economic anxiety in seasonal terms. Mason surveyed empty retail aisles and idle cashiers' checkouts and concluded that "it is not beginning to look anything like Christmas" and Regan worried that higher gasoline prices could "turn out to be the Grinch." She cited statistics that an average household will spend $100 each month more on gasoline than it did this time last year. ABC's David Muir (no link) focused on the currency, observing that "weak dollars, quite simply, do not go as far." The greenback's value in Canada, for example, is "the weakest exchange in 50 years."
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