This financial crisis is like a nasty wound that doesn’t want to heal, and now it is affecting the entire body respectively economy. This week the economic numbers from the US are once again worse than the average numbers predicted by economists.

Housing starts 550K fell 16 percent last month, Intitial Jobless claims 589K,  UK GDP shrinks 1.5%

And the forecasted effects on the economy are corrected downwards along with the worsening economic data as well. The European Comission forecasts a contraction of 2.8 percent for the UK economy in 2008, which would be the biggest contraction since world war II. As inflation is not a concern anymore and the outlook darkens there will most likely be another drop in the benchmark rate of the ECB in the near future, currently standing at 1.5 percent. As the traditional monetary tools such as monetary easing and quantitative easing show only limited effectiveness, governments around the world are looking for new methods to alleviate the problems of the economy, ranging from efforts to losen the credit markets and bloster lending to business and consumers by buying toxic assets on banks balance sheets through the creation of a bad bank, although it seems as if there is too much of this crap around and nobody really knows how to price these assets.

But hey, as long as we don’t have a terrorist attack with a biological weapons that wipes out half of humanity, we don’t all go blind or our women have no children, and we have no Zombies or Terminators showing up I guess we can still relax (I guess I watch too much TV)!