Everyone, perform a Compare Console sales (non accumilative) from the beginning of September to the beginning of October.  Sells Have halved.

I know all ecomonies are not doing too well.  But are people really that scared of what the future brings?

Edit 1 lol.  Second post and no abuse this time.  Aren't I a good boy.

Its the economy. Its crashing, the problem is deeper than the Mortgage Backed Securities market, it goes right into the CDS Market (Credit Default Swap). Look it up, its basically taken every bank and tied their fates together. So if one goes, another goes, and another and another.

The Dow has plunged from 14,000 to 9,000 in only a few weeks. All credit at the highest levels of our market has frozen up. People are scared and dont want to spend 300+ on a toy.

I dont know how old you are, but get a mortgage and a couple car payments under your belt and then see the real possibility of the job market drying up and sucking your job down with it and then you'll see why parents and others arent splurging.

Also, I have heard some people that are very knowledgeable in the Stock Market and the Economy simply say that they are "Scared to hell of what might come".

My stock portfolio has dropped to 2/3 of it's value from one month ago. In one month, I've lost 33% of my money, and I'm one of the lucky ones. That's why.

Well Im 37 and I have a mortgage thank you lol.  I have also been following the markets a lot lately.  I personally feel that whoever was going to go bust has done and those that needed to be bailed out have been.  Well I can only speak for Britain.  Hopefully the worst is over and in the coming months the banks will start to relax somewhat.  Hopefully they wont make any silly investments in the future.  But who knows.

I feel your pain mate.  My dad has quite a bit invested at the moment.  But as I tell him.  Investments dont have to be short term.  THe markets will recover and you hopefully should get your money back.

I'm fairly glad this thing happened when it did. I'm 23, and while I have pretty much 80% of my assets in stock, it's not a tremendous amount and I have the luxury of time for it to recover. If my guy manages to liquidate some stocks and make some good investments at a low price, I might even come out of this mess pretty good. But speaking as an American, I fear the worst is yet to come. To be honest, I'm scared shitless.

Not really, I mean I would love to say that the Bail out might help, but I dont think it will. I'll breifly explain the CDS scam.

A CDS kind of acts like insurance. You buy a 100 dollar bond, and then tell someone else, hey if I give you 2% of the value of this bond every year, will you give me the value of the bond now (100 dollars) if the company the bond is attacked to tanks.

So people liked this, but then realised that as they were written, you didnt need to own the bond that you insured. The best way of giving an example is if you know a dude, and he gets a million dollar life policy. As he starts to get sick, someone else gets a life insurance policy on him, then as he gets sicker another 100 people get million dollar policies on him, and then if hes about to die thousands do the same.

So he dies, his family gets the million, and so do these few thousand people that basically bet on him dying.

Well what happens to the poor Life Insurance policy? They now instead of paying out a million dollars, have to pay out a hundred million dollars on one dude.

This happened in the stock market ten fold that. Whats worse, is that a company with only a 100 million dollars would go and give a CDS to someone for a billion dollar company. Now they are charging 20% of that 1 billion dollar bonds worth, making themselves 20 million dollars a year. Its a good stream of money.Problem is, if that 1 billion dollar company goes bankrupt, then the company with only 100 million dollars owes someone a billion dollars.

Now these companys were doing this many many fold, right now the Captial to Debt ratio of the market is thought to be something like 6 trillion dollars in stocks and bonds, and 70 trillion dollars in speculation and debt.

I dont think 700 billion dollars will touch this problem, even worse, is that these companys started giving CDS to each other. So when one goes, other banks all owe even more banks billions of dollars that they dont have, so they go under, and MORE banks with CDS's on that now defunct bank go under, and so on and so on.

I highly recommend you download this http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=365 It explains everything I just explained, but in a far easier to understand way.

But really, Im sure if you looked all over you would see all sorts of luxury goods going south in sales.

I blame Wii Fit!!

I have nothing invested luckily, I'm only a student but the situation is so scary I've actually thought about moving to Canada if things get too bad. I've never thought about leaving the country before but if America is hit as bad as the great depression I know musicians like me won't get jobs.

I don't know, music might be just what some people need right now. I don't think running to Canada will really help though. Pretty much every major market has been hit, from Tokyo to Sao Paulo to Paris to Johannesburg. The world is gonna have a hard time.