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Pentagon accuses Alibaba, Baidu and BYD, three of China's biggest companies, of supporting the Chinese military

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Costco CEO Ron Vachris rose from forklift driver to the C-suite without a college degree: ‘Don’t chase a title’ is the career advice that got him there

What it feels like now

By
Stanley Bing
Stanley Bing
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By
Stanley Bing
Stanley Bing
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May 14, 2009, 9:50 AM ET

confusedWe had a run up last week. For the last couple of days, we’re running down. There was good news among the bad and people were talking about sunlight for a while. This week, the credit markets are getting nervous again and we’re not so sure. Plus, it’s drizzling. Doesn’t May seem colder than usual? Does this mean there’s no more global warming? Or is this just a pause before we all quite literally melt down?

Are we recovering? Are we sliding back? Is the upswing over? Are we just taking a breather? Unemployment is still bad but not growing quite so fast as it was a few months ago. But Wal-Mart’s revenue ticked down a little. Does that mean people ran out of money in April? Will it be the same in May? How about June? Worse? Better?

See, now would be the time for those professionals with a totally disinterested position in the markets, if any such there be, to employ their skills to tell us what’s going on. Is this all emotional? Are there some metrics we should be employing to get a little bit of visibility into the future? Forget the future, how about right now? Is there an analyst, an economist, a professor, government regulator, seer, dowser or astrologer out there who can actually tell anybody what’s going on?

In the meantime, who should we be listening to? Paul Krugman? Nostradamus? Susan Boyle?

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By Stanley Bing
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