\n\n\n" }The \"green shoots\" theory of economic recovery is starting to look a bit like the herbs in my back yard--the ones I forgot to tell Peter to water while I was in Omaha. Retail sales fell again, despite confident proclamations that consumers had rethought their overreaction last fall. And foreclosures hit another record, which was oddly described as a \"levelling off\" by a lot of papers. The March numbers showed a big spike, because legislative and corporate moratoriums expired. In that context, a 1% increase in April isn't a \"levelling off\"--it's extraordinarily worrying.
\nI don't want to push the Great Depression analogy too far, but what's surprising when you go back to primary sources from 1930 is the optimism. I don't mean to imply that everyone thinks things are just swell. But while you know that they are facing the worst economic decade of the twentieth century, they don't.
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