ECONOMY WATCH : Trying to Believe

Pity us poor consumers. We’ve been told that if only we had confidence, we could get the country moving again. There’s nothing basically wrong with the economy, they tell us. It’s all in our heads.

And we’re trying, really, we are. But, hey, it’s getting harder. Ford lost $574.4 million in the third quarter. GM lost $1.1 billion. And that’s just this week’s news. Last week it was the banks: Security Pacific, $508 million in the red; Citicorp, $885 million.

And then there are the layoffs, though, if you ask us, the word layoff should be retired. Back in the good old days, when you got laid off it meant you might be recalled. No longer: We’re talking jobs permanently eliminated. When she goes, she’s gone: 20,000 gone this year at IBM; 30,000 at Sears. About 600,000 jobs gone forever since 1989, 250,000 just in the first six months of 1991.

Funny thing about those layoffs is that every one of them happened to a human being with a mouth, and every mouth immediately began a word-of-mouth chain reaction of consumer unconfidence. That word-of-mouth defines the mood in which we hear the economic news from on high. We may not own stock in Ford or GM or Citicorp or Security Pacific, but we hear about these losses on the car radio and we scratch our heads when they call it “slow economic recovery.” Recovery? Are we missing something? If this is slow recovery, what would slow decline look like?

Consumer self-confidence. We’re doing our best out here, but it’s getting to be a struggle.