Two Earnings Reports Perfectly Sum Up The Economic Divide In America (EBAY, AMEX)

Yesterday, eBay had some scary things to say about the outlook for consumer spending in its conference call on Q3 earnings results. "The reality is the thing that's caused the most angst is what we believe is a dramatically decelerating U.S. e-commerce growth rate," said eBay CFO Bob Swan on the call. "When we came into the third quarter, we looked at a stable U.S. market, and lo and behold, in a relatively short period of time, we've seen a pretty rapid deceleration in the market." Unfortunate...