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By Matthew Quinn
Meredith Whitney, everyone’s favorite uber-bear bank
analyst, is looking ahead to 2010 and things are just as dismal in her crystal
ball as ever.
She told CNBC that, “"I have 100 percent conviction
that the consumer is not getting any better and there's not more liquidity…For
a 2010 prediction, which is so disturbing on so many levels to have so many
Americans be kicked out of the financial system and the consequences both
political and economic of that, it's a real issue. You can't get around it.
This has never happened before in this country."
Of course, ever-resourceful companies are able to squeeze
more out of less, leaving them plenty optimistic about sales recovering without
jobs being added, according to a survey from the Business Roundtable released
Tuesday. Sixty-eight percent of CEOs said this quarter that they expect sales
to grow, while only 19 percent plan to add workers.
Jobs are only one of the problems for consumers, though.
Whitney said one of her greatest concerns is that they don’t have access to
credit and are effectively “getting kicked out of the financial system.”
"You're going to get a situation where you revert from
a consumer standpoint," she told CNBC, "where those that had bank
accounts for the first time, credit cards for the first time, homes for the
first time get kicked out of the system and then fall prey to real predatory
lenders."
Numbers out of the Federal Reserve on Monday didn’t do
anything to assuage those fears.
Consumer credit outstanding decreased for the ninth straight
month in October and contracted at an annual rate of 3.25 percent in the third
quarter. Revolving credit decreased at a rate of 7.25 percent in the quarter
and non-revolving credit decreased at a rate of 1 percent.
And since the U.S. is a consumer driven economy, all signs
point to this recovery requiring a long hospital stay.
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