U.S. retail sales collapse

It's become a cliché, but I think we can now officially say that the financial crisis has been worse than 9/11 for the United States:

The Commerce Department said Friday that retail sales fell by 2.8 percent last month, surpassing the old mark of a 2.65 percent drop in November 2001 in the wake of the terrorist attacks that year.

Back in October, al Qaeda-linked groups were taking credit for getting the United States into a quagmire that had "exhausted its resources and bankrupted its economy." That's rank economic illiteracy -- America's current woes have a lot more to do with subprime mortgages than overextension abroad. If anything, credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations have proven to be the true weapons of mass destruction of our age.