“But color me skeptical when people start using phrases like “never” and “not in our lifetimes”, etc.”
I have 40 years professional business experience (energy, real estate), coupled with some grad school.
To extrapolate that a one month 2% drop in retail sales equates with “never in our lifetimes” is silly nonsense.
But, hey it was on the internet so it must be true.
The internet serves up an almost constant flow of information—it does that well.
But it does little to separate the lowest quality info from the highest quality.
(By the way—statements like this seldom qualify the statistic. Is it a 2% drop from the same month last year? If that is the extent of this most horrific of recessions, then I’d say we got off pretty easily.)
YOu are correct, of course, but the conclusion is not a mere extrapolation: surveys show that people's risk-aversion has changed.
Yeah, I learned a while back not to use words like: “always”, “never”, “all”, “any”, etc. Something always comes along to make you look foolish.
..... Your comments about the nature of data on the web are spot on. IMO, one can characterize the web as a river of information and opinion that is a mile wide, an inch deep, with a few really good fishing holes randomly scattered about.