All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

It's ironic in an Alanis Morissette kind of way that gas prices are down now that the summer travel months are behind us. A USA Today poll from earlier in the year found that a third of Americans canceled vacations because of pain at the pump.

But in the past few days, gas station managers couldn't change those signs fast enough. The prices are dropping quickly…back to below three dollars a gallon in many areas. Crude oil…which makes up a big chunk of the price of gas…has fallen 44 percent since the spring.

Not to be the black fly in your chardonnay, but cheaper gas is kind of a mixed blessing. It means demand is down and people are spending less.

Some economists say it's a harbinger of a coming recession and possibly more job losses. If that's true, those four dollar gallons we bemoaned might have been a good thing. That's either ironic, or just the law of supply and demand economics.

Mark Knoller is a White House Correspondent for CBS News.

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To hear the White House tell it, one factor in the House vote yesterday against the administration’s bailout plan – was the word "bailout."

"It’s really unfortunate shorthand for a very complicated issue." says White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto.

He says the administration plan to rescue the financial markets is "not a bailout for Wall Street" and "certainly not a bailout for Wall Street CEOs."

Okay then – what should we call it?

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This post was written by Guy Campanile, a producer for the CBS Evening News.

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The impact of the credit crunch on Wall Street, the real estate industry and corporate America is well documented. What's been given less attention is how severely small business has been affected in the past 12 months by the tightening of credit.

Florida small business has been hit especially hard in the wake of the real estate market collapse there. Regional and local banks burned by bad mortgages have become totally adverse to risk. Entrepreneurs eager to start their own business are finding it nearly impossible to secure loans of any size.

If you question the effect on the economy, take this statistic into consideration: small business represents 70 percent of the job growth in the United States. Without small business there are no new jobs. And if people aren't working, they aren't paying their mortgages – or buying homes. Many small businesses need loans to meet payroll or inventory. They too are being denied.

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Last week was a roller coaster ride for the stock market—and nervous investors. Buy? Sell? Sit tight? Panic? (The last, of course, seemed the most popular.)

On Thursday, the Federal Reserve injected $24 billion into the financial system; the very next day, it injected $38 billion. That was the Fed’s largest intervention in the economy since the days when the market reopened after 9/11.

But to everyone’s surprise, despite the Dow’s scary 387 point plunge on Thursday, the market actually closed UP for the week. Not by much, .4%, but up.

To make sense of all this, we called Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale University, who wrote the best-selling "Irrational Exuberance," about the stock market boom of the 1980s and `90s. He’s more-than-capable of talking markets, models, valuation ratios, international risk sharing -— but he’s also been married for 31 years to a psychologist. We thought he'd have an interesting take on the market, and some insight into what we might expect as a new week of trading begins.

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1. So what was going on last week?

Markets do this. They go through sudden drops and get people rattled. Since 1950, we`ve had more than 50 such drops. It happens every year or so.

Markets all over the world have been booming. Countries are setting new records for the first time since 2000, and even depressed countries like Japan have been booming.

Now some investors are starting to wonder if it`s coming to an end. It`s very simple. Some people start saying, I`m getting out.

But because it`s coming at the end of a real estate boom, and at the end of spectacular growth in the stock market, there is the sense that something might be wrong, and that it could develop into something worse.

2. Are we seeing a replay of the 1990s' irrational exuberance, followed by the bubble`s burst?

The stock market never got as exuberant in recent years as it did in the 1990s. But I would say we`ve had irrational exuberance in the real estate market...

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