The Stock Market! It's happening again!

People who cannot understand the relationship between cause and effect should not be allowed out.

The latest reason to sell all your shares and move your money into 1980s era survivalist bunkers and dried food is...retail sales were down in Quarter 4 of 2008!

Of course no one could have seen that coming. There were no indicators in 2008 that it might be a bit of a lean christmas or anything, so the news that in the face of potential job losses, the struggle of the auto industry to do anything resembling sensible, general panic and mayhem leading to tumbling share prices which crash the value of a company and force it to look really hard at it's bottom line...none of these things might contribute to nervous Christmas punters believing that a sock, or a mattress, might be safer to put money in than a bank, and certainly important to save.

So, in the face of expectations that sales would be down, because we've all seen that happen in uncertain times before, and it was predicted by any amount of financial pundits, what we're looking at is the shocked response of a market to news that it has been expecting for at least a month.

Oh no! It's exactly as we believed it would be! Run to the hiiiiiiiiiillllssss!!!

Does that strike anyone else as illogical? Even...skittish? Stupidly so?