Clinging to a recession's silver lining.

• Position: RUNDLES WRAP-UP - Personal account

At first I didn't think anything of it. Two years ago, my parents bought me a one-year subscription to a golf magazine. No amount of reading about golf is ever going to help my game, so I decided I would not renew.

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I got my renewal notice giving me two months to re-up. Then another with a one-month deadline. Then a Final Notice. Then another Final Notice. Then another. And another. And another. I still get the magazine and the Final Notices.

I did the same with a different magazine, a weekly, too, and I think I'm up to six Final Notices and an extra 25 or so weeks of issues. They are relentless.

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They don't send me bills to pay, just more notices, more editions and more offers.

If the economy were great, or were moving ahead, they'd cut me off in a heartbeat for not responding. But since this is, or might soon become, a recession, companies need warm bodies with cash.

It's a buyer's market out there.

There have been a ton of newspaper stories lately about how the housing market is so slow that prices are tumbling. In my own neighborhood, there are so many $1-million-plus properties on the market that you could have that McMansion for several hundred thousand under what the developers had in mind.

I also read that in the Detroit area, real estate is more than a buyer's market, it is rather a "buyer's paradise"--but, of course, if you took this Edenesque opportunity, you'd own a house in Detroit. Good luck with that.

How about televisions? Last Christmas, everyone was lapping up the HD, big-screen jobs for like $1,200--some $800 below what they were going for just months before. This Yuletide, as we might be in recessionary throes, that bargain-basement $1,200 TV will probably go for $500, $700 tops.

I think there's a need to be upbeat. President Jimmy Carter, during a period of severely high inflation, blamed the nation's economic woes on our collective attitude; we had a "crisis of confidence" in the future, he said in 1979. Shortly thereafter, we voted him out. President George W. Bush, in the midst of the economic downturn following the 9-11 disaster, suggested we all go shopping, and we did. Like mad.

I wasn't really paying attention to whether a recession was coming or not until the annual "There's a recession coming" presentation by the Colorado economist Tucker Hart Adams. Actually, what Adams--a regional economist for U.S. Bank--said was...