Behind the Federal Reserve's latest rate cut

CLARKONOMICS: The economy has gone nowhere in the past 6 months. We'll leave it to the politicians to argue about the recession vs. no recession question. What's certain is that we're in a consumer recession as people deal with record levels of debt.

This is a time when you need to cool your spending. The Federal Reserve is "cooling down" as well. They made a small token cut in the interest rate today, but the vote was not unanimous. Clark thinks that's very telling.

Real relief won't come until we work out our excess of consumer debt and the excess in the housing market. The share of the U.S. economy that we as consumers constitute has been up around 70% for the last few years. Historically, it had been in the low 60s. So how did we manage to defy gravity? It was all done on borrowed money. The pain we're feeling now is the pain of crashing back down to the Earth.

Clark's advice? Clean up your own personal balance sheet. We're overleveraged, which is a fancy way of saying that we owe everybody too much money. The sad thing is that we weren't borrowing to finance a factory to make goods and generate more money. We were borrowing for lifestyle. We were borrowing to have money to go the mall. So it was really a false sense of prosperity. We need to get back to real prosperity.

Christa is a work in progress in this respect. For 10 years, she's heard Clark's advice on smart spending and ignored it. Fortunately, she's been much better about taking his advice on saving for retirement. But now she's turned over a new financial leaf. Her blog details the efforts she's making to take better care of what she already has -- instead of buying new things. Check it out!