Are we finally seeing a turnaround in the credit markets.  News the past few days is steadily getting more positive in regards to rigid credit markets throughout the world.  Everyone is wondering now why stocks continue to slide, but the reality is that these tight credit markets have had a noticeable affect on small and mid sized businesses throughout the world.  Even larger manufactures like GM are taking a beating in regards to the lack of easy capital.  The world government bailouts are finally starting to take affect though, as we can see in the following articles.

Global News

Signs of life in global markets

US News

US Stocks Jump on Bond Insurer Bailout Plans, Oils retreat

The reality is that we're going to see more turmoil over the next few months.  Now we're seeing reality dawn that we're actually in a global recession.  Being in the mortgage industry, I realized that we were heading for a recession since August of 2007.  The problem is the average man or woman on "main street" hasn't been paying attention until the markets seized up this past month.  Now everyone is focused on their money, and unfortunately this may make the recovery more difficult to over come.

Sell fullfilling prophecy is unfortunately a reality of most economic downturns. What we need is the average American to start believing that he's safe.  If they continue to feel like they're last pay check maybe their last, then that prophecy maybe fullfilled, as retail sales drag, and major manufacturers and service related companies begin laying off employees.  Maybe we're lucky in some ways as well.  If everyone nationally had stopped purchasing major items in August 2007, then we would be in much bigger trouble today with the unraveling of many of these financial institutions.  Perhaps we dodged the bigger bullet because of the fixation on home values.