| Page 3 of 3 < |
Stocks Sink as Gloom Seizes Wall St.
![[Graph: The Dow's daily close over the past month]](http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2008/10/16/GR2008101600157.gif)
SOURCE: Bloomberg | GRAPHIC: The Washington Post - October 16, 2008
|
TOOLBOX
   Resize
COMMENT
 Discussion Policy
 CLOSE
Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Who's Blogging  |
William Cook, a retired shipping and receiving manager for Chevrolet, has already started scaling back his holiday shopping plans.
"I'm slowing down my spending, careful about my shopping, not buying clothes or prime ribs or lobster or steaks," said Cook, who has seen the price of his GM stock -- a significant part of his portfolio -- plummet nearly 80 percent in the past year.
The auto industry was particularly hard hit last month. Demand for new vehicles was drying up, and loans were more difficult to come by for those who were in the market. Compared with September 2007, sales at auto dealers were down 20 percent, the Commerce Department said.
The only two categories in the department's report that posted gains last month were gas stations and health and personal-care stores, and even they rose less than half a percentage point. For the third quarter, consumer spending is expected to decline for the first time in 17 years.
New York University economics professor Nouriel Roubini, who had long been predicting a housing downturn that would trigger a recession, said he expected an economic slowdown to last 18 to 24 months. The average recession is about 10 months, he said.
"It's not going to be short and shallow," Roubini said. "The macro news from now on is going to be really awful."
Shares in many companies with ties to credit markets declined this week. Investors drove down the price of Domino's Pizza stock by 32.8 percent after the company disclosed Tuesday that Lehman Brothers had been the primary part of a $150 million credit facility the chain had lined up.
But Domino's chief executive David Brandon said that the pizza company had enough cash and that the credit facility was "untapped and unused."
"The materiality of that to my company is like a spit in the tea of life," Brandon said. "People are very spooked, and it's almost unnerving to me that the reflexes of the market are such that all we had to do is mention the word Lehman and our stock is being pounded as though we relied on them."
Staff writers Peter Whoriskey, Lori Montgomery, Steven Mufson, Binyamin Appelbaum, Anita Huslin, Dan Eggen and Heather Landy in New York contributed to this report.
