"Robert Shiller:
The Great Debt Scare, by Robert J. Shiller, Commentary, Project Syndicate: It might not seem that Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis and growing concern about the United States’ debt position should shake basic economic confidence. But they apparently have. And loss of confidence, by discouraging consumption and investment, can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, causing the economic weakness that is feared. ...
The ... Thomson-Reuters University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers ... has included a remarkable question about the reasonably long-term future, five years hence...:
“Looking ahead, which would you say is more likely – that in the country as a whole we’ll have continuous good times during the next five years or so, or that we will have periods of widespread unemployment or depression, or what?” ...
Those answers plunged into depression territory between July and August, [the period when US political leaders worried everyone that they would be unable to raise the federal government’s debt ceiling and prevent the US from defaulting,] and the index of optimism based on answers to this question is at its lowest level since the oil-crisis-induced “great recession” of the early 1980’s. It stood at 135, its highest-ever level, in 2000, at the very peak of the millennium stock market bubble. By May 2011, it had fallen to 88. By September, just four months later, it was down to 48..."at http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2011/09/shiller-the-great-debt-scare.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EconomistsView+%28Economist%27s+View+%28EconomistsView%29%29
