Consumers: Down, but Still Spending

It's the perfect storm of economic malaise: Surging fuel and food prices, declining home values, a stock market waltzing back and forth into bear territory and job cuts combined with stagnant wages.

No wonder consumers are so gloomy.

But while consumer-confidence surveys are watched closely for clues about the country's fiscal health, shifting tides in the economy and society at large have made them less relevant and less accurate.

One prominent index was recently pegged at 56.4 -- the third-lowest reading on record since the poll was first conducted in 1952, according to Reuters and the University of Michigan. The last time people felt quite so bad about the economy was during dramatic recessions in the 1980s. ...