ON WALL STREET/Conor O'Clery: Many analysts use anecdotal evidence to sustain their economic forecasts. Alan Greenspan likes to count the empty containers stacked at ports to judge import activity. Here's another one. I use an elevator to go up and down 42 stories every day. Often my fellow button-pushers are employees of local restaurants, delivering carry-outs to residents. Eating-in is particularly popular in downtown Manhattan, where people are always rushing somewhere. I haven't seen so many delivery guys recently in the lifts.
Then I heard an interesting thing from my building manager. The city official in charge of garbage removal in lower Manhattan told him the other day he was spending an extra $1 million (€1.01 million) to buy three extra garbage trucks. The reason: more people are cooking for themselves rather than spending money on food deliveries, creating much more disposable rubbish.
Call it the ITT theory - the incremental trash theory. It is a sure sign that Americans, certainly my neighbours anyway, are cutting back on their optional spending.
According to polls, people across the United States are more worried about their financial future today than at any time since the 1970s. Especially hard hit by the market slide are the 80 million Americans who own stock.
People over the age of 60 are rolling back their spending or staying longer in work because their retirement assets are tied up in so-called 401(k)s, stock holdings where employees match employers' contributions, which have been shrinking fast - now disparagingly called 403(k)s or 402(k)s.
Enron employees lost $1 billion in employee retirement savings denominated in now-worthless stock.
WorldCom workers face similar wipe-outs.
These retirement savings plans have largely replaced old-fashioned cash pensions in the US, so the fall-out on Wall Street is more widespread thathe crash of 1987. The percentage of the workforce that will receive a traditional pension has fallen from 40 to 20 per cent in two decades.
Even the boringly safe mutual funds are shrinking, unable to resist the relentless pounding from the markets - the Dow Jones index fell on Monday to its first close below 8,000 for four years, after a month when the index had triple-digit falls on 10 days.
Just as people in the 1990s saw the market going up, wanted in, and drove it up further, so today people see the market falling, want out, and drive stocks lower. Anyone who abandoned riskier stocks and put their savings into, say the supposedly rock-solid Vanguard 500 index mutual fund, would have seen their worth fall 25 per cent this year.
The result is that many Americans are having to change their spending patterns.
Watch for falls in consumer confidence in the coming months. Newspapers in the US are full of interviews with families who have abandoned vacations or home repairs as their portfolios shrank, and retirees who spend their days behind a supermarket register rather than on the golf course, as their savings produce less monthly income.
A quarter of American people in the 60 to 70 age group are working today, compared to one-fifth 10 years ago, and confidence is falling in that cornerstone of the American dream - the belief that stocks are capable of generating wealth and providing for retirement for future generations.
Many Americans are raiding other assets to keep up with college tuition payments, home repairs or new car purchases. With the housing market booming (for how long?), home-owners are turning to a unique American way of turning property into disposable spending, applying for cheque books tied to their home equity value. Others are cutting down in practical ways, like dusting off old home cooking books and ordering fewer meals delivered to their homes.
In downturns there is always an upside. Some companies do well in recessions, like Wal-Mart, which offers cheaper household goods. The lesson from this story: Take your money out of Chinese takeaways and invest in grocery stores and companies that make garbage trucks.
