Howard Davidowitz: Decline and fall, grim and gloomy, delivered good and hard

Dig this clip of Howard Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz & Associates, and you'll know why the Motley Fool calls him "Davidodelicious!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Gist of the Jeremiad: "We're in a complete mess and the consumer is smart enough to know it. If the consumer isn't petrified, he or she is a damn fool… The worst is yet to come with consumers and banks. This country is going into a 10-year decline. Living standards will never be the same."

If Davidowitz seems like a guy you could catch a heart attack from, it may be because he's a consultant to retailers, who have particular reason to believe Americans are not going to reinflate the debt economy using money they can't pay back from jobs they don't have. Maybe there are some big tranches of data I'm missing, but it seems like all talk of a stabilizing economy is drawn from cockamamie measures of confidence or feeling. Take a look at actual transactions, at the rate of people buying items large, medium or small, and you will probably agree that the idea the economy is stabilizing is "preposterous."