The Birmingham News reported on Sunday that Alabama’s Jefferson County’s financial options are quickly shrinking after a large credit downgrade late Friday left the cash-strapped county with few options and increased the chances of bankruptcy. The abrupt downgrading of the county’s sewer bonds to junk status by Standard & Poor’s sent county officials scrambling… Moody’s Investors Service last week said Jefferson County’s menagerie of complex financial structures is unprecedented and that the county is teetering on default; furthermore they noted that its situation is opaque to outsiders who can’t get updated information from commissioners… The crisis stems from the collapse of Jefferson County’s sewer bonds.

Read more about it all here.

In the hardscrabble world of Depression-era Alabama, my daddy said there were two pictures on his wall: Jesus and President Franklin Roosevelt. There was more behind those pictures than a wall, of course. Both men were viewed as saviors. One from sin. The other from the next worst thing ”” poverty.

Poverty is a monster. It saps the will and can kill the spirit. For the nearly one in six American children who grow up in it, poverty is also a dream snatcher, oftentimes snatching the dream of a better life before it can rise above the cracked plaster ceiling.

Read it all.

There are two sayings that astronomer Aileen O’Donoghue repeats to her students: “Science is the current best guess” and “You can’t do science in your basement.” By the first remark, she means that we can never be certain about scientific theories (which is not to say that theories are not to be taken seriously or that the theory of evolution, say, or Newton’s law of gravity can be discarded). Her second point is that though you can do experiments in a basement, findings must be brought into the light of day and subjected to the scrutiny of the scientific community. The testing of some findings can take a long time–it took 300 years for an error in Newton’s Principia.

–Aileen O’Donoghue as cited in the Christian Century, March 11, 2008, edition, page 9, in reference to her new book The Sky Is Not a Ceiling: An Astronomer’s Faith

The revelation of his hidden world comes at a time of deep tension within the Episcopal Church of the United States over the issue of homosexuality. Since the church ordained an openly gay bishop in the Diocese of New Hampshire in 2003, a dozen congregations in various parts of the country have withdrawn from the American branch of the church and aligned themselves with theologically conservative African or South American branches of the worldwide Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is a part.

Those African and South American branches have described homosexuality as “an offense to God.”

At St. John the Divine, where inclusiveness toward those of all backgrounds and sexual orientations has long been fundamental to the culture of the congregation ”” in part as a result of Bishop Moore’s leadership ”” the reaction was more complicated.

“I’d like to say that we all have secret lives ”” and that’s why we come here,” said Mary Burrell, a longtime member of the congregation. “We are all sinners, trying to find our way.”

Read it all.

An interesting and important discussion.

We have had problems with comments on the blog in the last two weeks, particularly in regards to tone. I do not know if it is Winter, the national mood in America, the Anglican church struggle fatigue, or what, but I really do want to encourage people to try communicate in a Christ like way. Also, please remember our strong preference for the use of real names–KSH.

One great puzzle about the recent housing bubble is why even most experts didn’t recognize the bubble as it was forming.

Alan Greenspan, a very serious student of the markets, didn’t see it, and, moreover, he didn’t see the stock market bubble of the 1990s, either. In his 2007 autobiography, “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World,” he talks at some length about his suspicions in the 1990s that there was irrational exuberance in the stock market. But in the end, he says, he just couldn’t figure it out: “I’d come to realize that we’d never be able to identify irrational exuberance with certainty, much less act on it, until after the fact.”

With the housing bubble, Mr. Greenspan didn’t seem to have any doubt: “I would tell audiences that we were facing not a bubble but a froth ”” lots of small local bubbles that never grew to a scale that could threaten the health of the overall economy.”

The failure to recognize the housing bubble is the core reason for the collapsing house of cards we are seeing in financial markets in the United States and around the world. If people do not see any risk, and see only the prospect of outsized investment returns, they will pursue those returns with disregard for the risks.

Were all these people stupid? It can’t be. We have to consider the possibility that perfectly rational people can get caught up in a bubble. In this connection, it is helpful to refer to an important bit of economic theory about herd behavior.

Read it all.

Calvin’s view that Christ’s body is objectively presented rather than objectively present–””as he would say, “truly presented to us” but not “enclosed in the bread” or “chewed with the teeth”””gives his teaching a distinctive place on the spectrum of Eucharistic doctrine. This is distinct not only from the Lutheran and Calvinist views but also from the low Protestant view usually attributed (I do not know how fairly) to Zwingli. In this low Protestant view the supper is merely a memorial, which means that the only link to Christ’s body is our state of mind, our faith. On the contrary, when Calvin insists that Christ’s body is truly presented, offered, and given to us, he is talking not about our state of mind but about the action of God, and perhaps the most important thing to pay attention to is the adverb truly, for what is at stake here is the truth of God’s word. Does God do as he says when he offers us Christ’s body? Calvin’s answer is an emphatic yes.

Read it all.

Dear Bp. Jefferts Schori,

I am an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of South Carolina and attended the [recent] meeting on Monday with you at St. Andrews, Mt. Pleasant. As I was rising to speak, time was called so I did not have an opportunity to offer my thoughts to you and those of us gathered.

First, thank you for your willingness to come and be with us. It seems always essential to meet face-to-face when there is conflict, mistrust and disagreement between parties. So, I am glad for the opportunity provided us to meet with you and listen to you in person. Perhaps you were able to listen to us as well.

I certainly won’t attempt to speak all that is on my mind, but as a 3rd generation Episcopal priest, the angst and sadness I feel for this province of the Anglican Communion could not be any deeper. I’ve written you once before about this, in fact””the only two occasions I have ever felt called to communicate with the Presiding Bishop. The perspective I offer is this. A majority of Episcopalians has chosen new directions with regards to an understanding of the primacy of Scripture and Biblical authority, with regards to the uniqueness and supremacy of Jesus Christ and his saving work, and finally with regards to marriage of same-sex persons. (If you only agree that it is the last of these three, the rest written below still can stand.)The side you are on has won the political battle for the high ground. Now that your battle has been won, one of the most urgent questions that remain is how to treat the losers. One can continue to wield power and simply beat us into submission or drive us out of the family. One can use every jot and tittle of the letter of the law to demean, belittle and thoroughly bind us by forceful, aggressive litigation and by a ”˜take no prisoners’ mentality. In other words, we are being told to do it the way the winners would have it or face various forms of reprisal. For those of us on the loser’s side, it is embarrassing, humiliating and heart-rending.

As Dr. [Kendall] Harmon highlighted on Monday [February 25th], this is not about 45 parishes. It is countless more! I have hundreds in my parish alone who are still in the Episcopal Church, but barely hanging on. For me, the operative word is thousands. That is the word for the winners to remember. There are thousands upon thousands who have left the Episcopal Church, are leaving the Episcopal Church, or simply have totally detached from the Episcopal Church solely for the reasons of General Convention decisions of the past decade. Thousands, tens of thousands, are spiritually dislocated and have lost their spiritual home””exiles, in other words. Are the winners certain they wish to jettison them all?

And yet as I read Episcopal Life or read quotations from Executive Council or from the Presiding Bishop’s office, I read that all is fine, there is great ministry going on (And I believe that is true in spite of the circumstances, but not relevant to the issues at hand.), and this is a little storm soon to pass over. I’ve been hearing that since 2000, but I do not believe it is true. Neither do I believe the storm is abating as I believe I heard you suggest on Monday.

Is there another alternative that the winners might choose in how they might treat the losers? Is there a Christ-alternative that rises above the law that transcends usual human behaviors that would be life-giving for all? I believe there is! It has not been heeded thus far because of the unwillingness to move from power to love. But, the gospel finally stands only on a measure of love whose depth is as wide and deep as the measure of the cross of Jesus Christ.

Dr. Paul Zahl in his book Grace in Practice writes:

”¦the case I know best, has occurred in relation to the loss of status on the part of the ”˜orthodox’ or ”˜conservative’ minority of the Episcopal Church in relation to the struggle over human sexuality”¦.The interest of it here is not in the issue of Christian social ethics that precipitated it, but in the political defeat of a minority by a majority in an institutional church, and the way this defeat played out. No mercy was given. The result was total loss and splitting.

This is what happened. A victory in the form of a political vote was won, and the winning group was unable to assure the losers that a place would remain for dissidents within a comprehensive church. The minority appealed to the majority for ”˜space’ or toleration: a place of safety, a ”˜no-fly’ sector within the American Episcopal Church. This was not granted, and the spin-out of the long process of applications for such a place of safety is a paper trail worthy of study. But the victors, to whom the losers constantly appealed, did not give grace. Formal concession was never granted. The result was a species of martyrdom for ”˜conservative’ Episcopalian Christians. The formal result was a long-term hemorrhage, and the end of what had once been an uneasy but official unity. (p. 230)

I would offer that this is clearly the perception of thousands of present and former Episcopal Christians. As a presbyter of the Church I appeal to your high office, Bp. Jefferts Schori, to seek for ways of creating space for us to co-exist while we sort out the turmoil of disparate views of sexuality, Biblical authority, the supremacy of Christ. What the winners are doing is not working. Oliver Cromwell’s plea to his adversaries applies here to the winners yet again, ”˜I beseech thee by the bowels of Christ, could ye be wrong?’

In Christ,

–(The Rev.) Mike Lumpkin is rector, Saint Paul’s, Summerville, South Carolina

Members of the Primates/Anglican Consultative Council Joint Standing Committee attended Sung Eucharist at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London on March 2, the midway point of their meeting which is being held behind closed doors at the Anglican Communion Office.

Meeting through March 4, a large portion of the committee’s time is being devoted to Lambeth Conference planning, the Windsor Process and budgetary discussions, said the Rev. Canon James M. Rosenthal, director of communications for the Anglican Communion.

The committee, which includes Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, will also meet with the Windsor Continuation Group, whose formation was announced February 12 by the Archbishop of Canterbury. That group has been charged with addressing outstanding questions arising from the Windsor Report and reviewing the various formal responses received from provinces and instruments of the Anglican Communion.

Read it all.

Mortgage foreclosure notices are going out so fast that in some states the number of new foreclosure proceedings each month is greater than the number of homes sold that month.

The foreclosure problem appears to be greatest in the West, particularly in Nevada, where home prices soared in the housing boom and are now falling rapidly.

Worries about foreclosures have led to a variety of legislative proposals in Washington and in state capitals, as well as to a voluntary plan organized by the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., that seeks to delay foreclosures while homeowners and lenders try to work out agreements. But so far, no consensus has emerged on legislation, and the volume of foreclosure notices continues to rise.

During January, it was reported this week by RealtyTrac, there were 153,745 initial foreclosure notices sent out in the United States. That dwarfed the 43,000 total sales of newly built single-family homes and amounted to nearly half the total sales figure, which includes sales of existing homes and condominiums.

In the West, however, the picture was much worse.

Read it all.

I suspect that my path to Judaism isn’t much different from other American journeys to a new faith ”” whether it be from megachurch to Zen monastery, or from mosque to the Cross. We Americans lust after movement: from town to town, from spouse to spouse, from religion to religion.

I was brought up to believe unquestioningly in that loving yet grouchy God who sat Zeus-like on his golden throne. But in third grade, being an appallingly rational little brat, I made my mother cry when I told her that I didn’t believe in God. (Not being a complete idiot, though, I still believed in Santa Claus, if not the Easter Bunny.)

After that, came busy decades of indifference, agnosticism and vague stirrings in the soul, like winter squirrels in the attic. As with Moses and the Jews wandering in the desert for 40 years ”” which, from this vantage, doesn’t seem so long ”” it took me a good long while to reach my spiritual home.

My wife, Deborah, is Jewish, and we married in 1981 and later raised our two sons Jewish ”” so long, Santa, old pal. But I didn’t convert until 2004, didn’t officially and irrevocably spurn my Protestant roots till some 40 years after the fact.

Read it all.

An interesting analysis.

Watch it all (and please note it is only appropriate for certain audiences). Pornography is also the topic of the cover story of Christianity Today this month (not yet available on the web).

This is just fantastic, the man deserves a medal.

The trans-Atlantic slave trade was outlawed 200 years ago. Many throughout the world are commemorating the bicentennial with articles, conferences, discussions, classroom lessons, history tours, church services and respectful contemplation.

The horrors of chained servitude are recalled, the violence of the Middle Passage remembered: Africans stolen from their villages, tribes, families, stripped of their rights and identities, forced to labor thanklessly for others, sustain an economy that provided them little benefit.

Who today would not say this was a horrible age that revealed the full scope of mankind’s weakness and brutality?

Two hundred years later ”” still today ”” 27 million people are enslaved throughout the world. They are the products of the sex trade, workers in sweatshops, domestic servants trapped and threatened, indentured fruit pickers unable to escape the clutch of their masters.

Read it all.

My father was born in 1919, the beneficiary of vast wealth. He was a grandson of William H. Moore, who, as one of the Moore brothers of Chicago, had made a fortune in corporate mergers at the beginning of the twentieth century. Until he went away to St. Paul’s School, at twelve, my father spent every fall until Christmas at Hollow Hill, a gentleman’s farm in New Jersey. He went to a private school in nearby Morristown, and played with friends he kept for a lifetime, taking long walks and riding his horse on the farm’s hundred acres, tending his dog and his pet roosters, playing tennis and golf. In January, the family migrated to Palm Beach, where they lived in an Addison Mizner villa, Lake Worth on one side of the house and a wide ocean beach on the other. There, between fishing and boating trips with the captain of his father’s yacht and occasional golf with his father, my father was tutored until the family returned home at Easter””to Hollow Hill and to their enormous Manhattan apartment, on the eighteenth floor at 825 Fifth Avenue, which had a view of the sea-lion pond in the Central Park Zoo.

By his fifth form, or junior year, my father was beginning to pray on his own and to ask theological questions. In a diary otherwise marked by adolescent confusion, he is clear and certain when he writes about religion, as when Dr. Drury, the headmaster, gave a “spirited & awfully good sermon.” The idea of confession scared him, he told me later, but there was no question that he would be among the boys who made appointments with Father Wigram, a member of a contemplative order founded during the Oxford Movement, when he visited St. Paul’s in the fall of my father’s final year.

Since I always thought I knew the story of my father’s conversion, I never asked him to tell it. But six weeks before he died, at our last dinner out together, I realized I might not have another chance.

“He was a very, very old man,” my father said, describing Father Wigram. He emphasized the second “very” just as he would have in telling me a story when I was a child, but now I was a grown-up woman and he himself was a very, very old man, his huge, familiar hands frail but forcefully gripping the table where we sat, in the dark-panelled dining room of the Century Club. It was late October, he told me, and the leaves had fallen from the trees. Father Wigram had arrived and was receiving students.

“So you went into the room?”

“Yes,” my father said quietly. “And we talked.”

“About what, Pop?”

“Oh,” he said, his eyes slowly blinking, “about everything.”

Read it all.

Canon law expert Perry says, however, that the 39 Articles also spell out that a priest must be appointed by the local bishop to be allowed to preach within a diocese, something the Network churches have relinquished by voting to split.

“The notion that a parish could be freestanding and claim to be Anglican is perverse in the Anglican structure,” he said. “It just wouldn’t exist.”

Liberal Anglicans also argue that theological understanding continues to evolve.

“It’s an ongoing revelation,” Niagara Archdeacon Michael Patterson says.

And there is no requirement that the revelation be the same for everyone, says Perry, adding that a founding principle of the church was that, unlike the Catholic Church from which it split in the 16th century, there is no central authority decreeing the beliefs that define an Anglican.

Says Perry, “Somebody once said that the good thing about the Church of England is that it doesn’t tend to interfere with your religion.”

In fact, he says, the openness to diversity of opinion has traditionally been its strength, enabling it to span divergent cultures around the world.

Read it all.

Last spring, something was stirring under the white steeple of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College.

A motley group of young and clean-cut, goateed and pierced, white-haired and bespectacled filled the center’s Barrows Auditorium. They joined their voices to sing of “the saints who nobly fought of old” and “mystic communion with those whose rest is won.” A speaker walked an attentive crowd through prayers from the 5th-century Gelasian Sacramentary, recommending its forms as templates for worship in today’s Protestant churches. Another speaker highlighted the pastoral strengths of the medieval fourfold hermeneutic. Yet another gleefully passed on the news that Liberty University had observed the liturgical season of Lent. The t-word””that old Protestant nemesis, tradition””echoed through the halls.

Just what was going on in this veritable shrine to pragmatic evangelistic methods and no-nonsense, back-to-the-Bible Protestant conservatism? Had Catholics taken over?

No, this was the 2007 Wheaton Theology Conference, whose theme was “The Ancient Faith for the Church’s Future.” Here, the words spoken 15 years ago by Drew University theologian and CT senior editor Thomas Oden rang true: “The sons and daughters of modernity are rediscovering the neglected beauty of classical Christian teaching. It is a moment of joy, of beholding anew what had been nearly forgotten, of hugging a lost child.”

Read it all.

Read it all.

For what it’s worth here is my advice for McCain. Don’t run on experience. It hasn’t worked with Clinton and it won’t work for him. In McCain’s case it speaks for itself. Why downplay this obvious asset? Because this is a “change” election. If the economy continues to tank, it’s going to be even more of a change election. Remember the Bill Clinton mantra in 1992? “Change versus more of the same.” It worked. And it will work even more this time, since the number of Americans believing that the country is on the wrong track is even higher than in 1992.

Moreover, the whole “experience” and “readiness” theme would reinforce McCain’s biggest liability in the obvious narrative of the 2008 election: the old versus the young. He will seem like an establishment figure whose time has gone.

What McCain has to do is to coopt Obama’s message. McCain has to become the change candidate. He has a record that makes this plausible enough. He has long been a rebel in Washington: he has tackled Republican rigidity on climate change, spending excess and the war. If anyone can be said to have forced a change in strategy in Iraq, it is McCain.

What he needs to do is to reiterate that he brought change once before to Iraq and can bring it again, by orches-trating a withdrawal that is as careful (to paraphrase Obama) as the invasion was careless. But he needs to broaden that message, adding diplomacy to his theme….

Read it all.

Greetings T19 commenters,

Over the weekend we have had two threads which were rendered extremely difficult to read in some browsers by the posting of long links that overflowed the boundary of the comment box and caused subsequent comments to also runover into the sidebar. Unfortunately this elf who normally handles most of these types of tech problems was offline from Thursday afternoon – midday Sunday.

A couple of suggestions/requests:
1) Please avoid pasting long links in the comments. Learn how to use sites like tinyurl.com, or how to make a link using the bulletin board code (a kind of simplified HTML code) specified in the “help” section of the comment box. If you need help, feel free to e-mail the elves and we’ll be glad to assist.

2) If you notice a thread where there is an overflow comment that is messing up the formatting, please send a heads up to the elves e-mail box: T19elves@yahoo.com

Often, even if we don’t have time to read the threads, we do check the e-mail. That way any of us elves or Kendall can fix the offending comment and the blog formatting will be restored.

Thanks!

–elfgirl

They take risks to try to get to the truth

Nicole Flennaugh has a college degree, office experience and the modest expectation that, somewhere in this city on the eastern lip of San Francisco Bay, someone will want to hire her.

But Ms. Flennaugh, 36, a widow, cannot secure steady, decent-paying work to support herself and her two daughters. Nearly two years after she was laid off as a customer service representative at the Educational Testing Service, and even after applying for dozens of full-time jobs, she has been getting by with occasional stints as an office temp.

“You’re used to making $17 an hour with benefits, and now you have to take any job for $8 an hour,” Ms. Flennaugh says. On a recent afternoon, she sat in front of a computer terminal at an employment center in a gritty part of town, scrolling dejectedly through online job listings while sending another batch of applications into the ether.

“I’ve literally sat and cried, but my friends with double degrees are doing worse,” she says. “It’s the economy. It’s really bad.”

Read it all.

She is charged with the following:

c. Experience becomes the criterion through which the objective norms of morality are judged and set aside.

And she responds as follows:

Clarifications and Corrections

In Building Bridges, I recount that many Catholic gay and lesbian persons have prayed to God and have come to a conscience decision that their life experience, though contrary to the church’s teaching on homogenital behavior, does not separate them from God or the Church community.

I needed to explain more fully the Church’s teaching on conscience and the proper role that experience plays in its formation. In order to form a true conscience, one needs to interpret the experience of one’s life and the signs of the times6. Catholics are guided in this endeavor by the authoritative teaching of the Church, the witness or advice of competent people, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit7.

One’s conscience can make erroneous judgments. The Church teaches that a conscience decision to engage in homogenital behavior is an erroneous judgment and that a person must work to correct this erroneous conscience8. I must take better care to clarify this and stress that Catholics are called to follow this teaching.

Read it all.

The Vatican has cracked down on feminist interpretations of the liturgy, ruling that God must always be recognised as Our Father.

In a move designed to counter the spread of gender-neutral phrases, the Holy See said that anyone baptised using alternative terms, such as “Creator”, “Redeemer” and “Sanctifier” would have to be re-baptised using the traditional ceremony.

The Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith said yesterday: “These variations arise from so-called feminist theology and are an attempt to avoid using the words Father and Son, which are held to be chauvinistic.”

Read it all.

Update: The Zenit article on this is here.

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.

Romans 8:19

Yet there is something remarkable about so much religious diversity. Elsewhere in the world, religious difference is often a cause for violence and ostracism. America so honors the principle of religious tolerance that it has brought it into the home. Pew’s statistic about church-switching may be less a sign of spiritual flakiness than an emblem of freedom.

It should be noted that a third of the survey’s “converts” have gone from one Protestant congregation to another. In short, America is not, on the whole, giving up serious worship for the sake of New Age platitudes. Half of Americans who grew up without any religious affiliation adopted one in adulthood. Clearly Americans are still convinced there is a such a thing as religious truth — and it’s worth their time to search for it. Sorry, Mr. Hitchens.

The Pew survey confirms what scholars have been saying for years about the winners and losers in this religious economy: Religions that demand the most of people are growing the fastest. The mainline Protestant churches — with their less exclusionary views of salvation, looser rules for sexual conduct and sermons about social justice — have lost membership, especially since the early 1990s. The more traditional evangelical churches keep growing.

Read it all.

The increasing use of pornography is creating not a few problems. Late last year a judge in Melbourne, Australia, sentenced a man to 11 years in jail on a rape charge, reported the Age newspaper on Jan. 3.

Judge Damian Murphy, said that the Andrew Bowen had acted out a fantasy seen in material downloaded from the Internet.

The article’s authors, Maree Crabbe and David Corlett, commented that one consequence of Internet-based pornography is a shift to more extreme and violent sexual imagery. Scenes that are so degrading and humiliating that they would be banned from film and television are now freely available to anyone with a Web connection.

Crabbe and Corlett said that research shows a link between consumption of pornography and male sexual aggression. Even when the pornography is not violent, exposure to it tends to increase in the viewer tolerance of sexual violence.

Earlier last year a report published in Australia revealed record numbers of visitors to porn Web sites. According to a May 26 article in the Sydney Morning Herald, a survey found that 35% of Internet users had visited an “adult” site at least once in the preceding three months.

According to the article, psychologists and counselors say Internet pornography is a growing cause of marital problems due to increasing numbers of men who become compulsive users.

Read it all.

An outpouring of negative economic and financial reports soured the mood on Wall Street Friday as banks and other lenders further tightened credit in their struggle to contain damage from losses on mortgages, business loans and related debt.

Shares sank, and investors fled to the safety of Treasuries as the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index fell 2.71 percent and the Dow Jones industrial average dropped 315.79 points, or 2.51 percent, to 12,266.39. Both indexes capped their worst four months since 2002.

Prices of municipal bonds, bank loans and high-yield debt all fell as well.

The markets for ultrasafe debt backed by the federal government and other nations were alone in posting gains. Some commodities, including gold, were also up.

“The drumbeat of economic news has been unrelentingly bad,” said Edward Yardeni, a normally upbeat investment strategist. “The recession scenario is looking more and more credible.”

Read it all.

John Mauldin has more on this, including the following:

Let’s look at 10 recent items which have come across my screen, which I think leave little doubt that we are in a recession. (It could just as easily have been 20, but I think 10 are enough to prove the point.) In no particular order:

1. After hovering above 50 in recent months, the Chicago ISM number dropped sharply to 44.5 in February, notching its lowest reading since December 2001 and coming in well below expectations. This brings this survey in line with the disastrous services survey of last month.

2. The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey for the United States came in at 70.8. This is the lowest reading for the index in 16 years.

3. “The New York City Purchasing Manager’s Survey fell for the second consecutive month to 427.7 in February. The current conditions index fell to 43.4, down from 47.9 in January. The six-month outlook index was below 50 for the second consecutive month for the first time in the survey’s history; at 47.5 it was down from 70 in February of 2007. The worsening conditions reflect rising prices coupled with slower job growth and layoffs in financial services, as well as tightening credit conditions and higher unemployment.” (economy.com)

After you guess, watch it all–you may be surprised.